What makes learning Chinese easy
You don't have to conjugate verbs. You don't have to decline nouns. Declarative sentences have simple structure: Subject-Time-Verb-Object
View ArticleWhat makes learning Chinese hard
Tones. You need to be able to both speak and understand words using the correct tones for each word. Characters. Learning the characters is a lot harder than learning an alphabet. Pronunciation....
View ArticleReview of Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar
This thick volume by Charles N. Li and Sandra A. Thompson is a very well written guide to Chinese grammar. It combines detailed technical explanation with examples and clearly worded and useful...
View ArticleReview of Wenlin
Wenlin is at its heart an English-Chinese-Dictionary, but it has a number of extra features that take advantage of running on a computer that there really isn't a term for this type of software. In any...
View ArticleThe Chinese have a word for everything: zhui4xu4
One thing that keeps surprising me in Chinese are some of the words to describe things that we never thought of in English. My first word in that category is zhui4xu4, a son-in-law living in the house...
View ArticleFlashcard killers: diao4qian3 and pai4qian3
Earlier I wrote about Supermemo, my favorite flashcard program. I use it to manage 6342 vocabulary terms and a large number of other items. Sometimes, though, there are words that are just hard to use...
View ArticleMeasure words in English
One of the things in Chinese that the student has to learn are measure words. They seem like a strange concept because they are required for all nouns when enumerated, even simple ones like person or...
View ArticleThings for the student of Chinese to Avoid
Instructional books that use Pinyin without tone marks. Even though your use of the tones may not be very good, if you know what the tones should be you will do better than if you don't. Dictionaries...
View ArticleThoughts on Rosetta Stone: Chinese Explorer
The first software I used to learn Chinese was Rosetta Stone: Chinese Explorer. I got off to a good start with it. The idea is to hear Chinese and identify the picture that the Chinese refers to. It...
View ArticleRunning Wenlin on Linux
Wine has advanced enough to run Wenlin, and it does it quite well. I'd give it about 90%, but this is enough for me to not bother using it in Windows under VMWare anymore. If you aren't familiar with...
View ArticleListening to Chinese on VOA
VOA's Internet broadcasts are a good way to practice listening to Chinese. The announcers speak clearly, and if you know the news otherwise it will help you understand VOA. The only thing is that you...
View ArticleUnderstanding Spoken Chinese
I'm trying a new book called Making Connections from Cheng & Tsui. The book focuses on understanding spoken Chinese. This is exactly what I need, because I always have the hardest time with...
View ArticleChinese Character Test - How many Chinese characters do you know?
Clavis Sinica has come up with a fun test to determine how many Chinese characters you know. What you do is take a quiz where you need to identify the Pinyin and definition for individual characters....
View ArticleFollowup on Making Connections
I have finished the first 5 chapters of Making Connections and have some some comments to follow up on my earlier review. First, the book does much more than teach listening comprehension. Depending on...
View ArticleUsing Google for studying Chinese
I found a way to use Google for Chinese study. I'm going through the book Making Connections and came up to a question that I didn't know and the book did not answer. In Lesson 6 the book has the...
View ArticleThe Oxford-Duden Pictorial Chinese & English Dictionary
The Oxford-Duden Pictorial Chinese & English Dictionary is a dictionary covering lots of specialized words by using pictures. Each page has a thematic picture at the top with definitions below....
View ArticleThoughts on "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard"
I just came across the article Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard. I have to say this is the best thing I've read on the language in a long time. I have written before about what make Chinese easy and hard...
View ArticleA Practical Chinese Grammar
A Practical Chinese Grammar was written as a supplement to Practical Chinese Reader volume I and II. If you are using that series you want to get this grammar. The PCR provides brief technical...
View ArticleComments on Spoken Taiwanese
A while back I thought it might be useful to pick up some Fujianese. I looked hard for a book but had a hard time finding anything. I finally came across Spoken Taiwanese. Taiwanese is a variety of...
View ArticleChinese is not monosyllabic
One of the things that interested me about Chinese was something I read in the 1965 World Book Encyclopedia: Spoken Chinese is weak in speech sounds because the language is monosyllabic. That is, each...
View ArticleThe Pimsleur Method
I've seen the Pimsleur language courses at the store for a while and have wondered what their method was. I wasn't quite up to spending money to see, but when I ran into the some of the courses at the...
View ArticlePimsleur followup
I finished the Pimsleur Quick and Simple Cantonese course today and have a few more thoughts. While the Quick and Simple classes appear to teach the same vocabulary, the narration is customized for the...
View ArticleBook wish list
One thing that would be real nice is if the Beginning Chinese Reader books were available in simplified characters. I used them for a while with the traditional set. Each chapter teaches 10 new...
View ArticleLanguage Immersion Institute
This isn't about Chinese, but it is at least about learning a language. A couple of weeks ago I flew up to New Paltz, New York, to attend a weekend session at the Language Immersion Institute. I...
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