chinesespeaking

It’s hard, yet it’s very satisfying. My first language is Indonesian, which has no similarity at all with Mandarin Chinese. The easiest part is reading and writing. I can pass the HSK 3 test with a breeze in the reading and writing part. You just need to have the “Pleco” app and your textbook side-by-side, … Read more

Well, I am living in Suzhou. I have traveled to 46 cities in China. Always been a solo wandering soul. I can confirm that your assumption is quite true. I mean life in China without learning Chinese would be very challenging. If you are in a big city, like Shanghai or Beijing, you may still … Read more

Your question is almost impossible to answer. Chinese has a vast number of homophones. So when you say “yuxi,” it could have dozens of meanings. Here’s one of my guesses. First, the “Yuxi” you mentioned refers to 玉溪 (Yuxi), a city in Yunnan Province, China. But in China, when people mention this word, they don’t … Read more

I can’t give you a definitive description, but I can show you some pictures! The “Chinese way of studying” can be summed up by the slogan “只要学不死，就往死里学”, which roughly translates into “As long we don’t die from studying, we’ll study until we’re dead.” . Pictures of a typical Chinese classroom before Gaokao The holiday homework … Read more

The word ”中国”. As you can see,the ”Zhong” with the first tone and the “Guo” with the second tone in Mandarin combined as a word of “中国” means “China”. If we say the words in different tones in Mandarin,it probably means: There are 3*4=12 possibilities, each of which contains multiple other possibilities represented by different … Read more

It depends on your original native language. I assume you are a native English speaker since the question was in English. If you study full time using an immersion system you can be almost fluent in 12 months if you learn Spanish. To do the same thing with Mandarin will take about 3 to 5 … Read more

There is no doubt that the character “王” (Wang) originated from the pictograph of an axe. This is a large axe from the Shang Dynasty, and I even suspect that the middle part, resembling a human nose, is the origin of the character “王.” Here is the character “王” from the late Shang Dynasty inscriptions; … Read more

It is easy and very flexible. There are many ways to avoid such bad situation. I just take 2 usual solutions. 1st, use other words to instead. Different from English, Chinese character/hanzi have lots of similar words to instead. For example, if we say agree with your idea , we can say : 对，好，善，理当如此，甚妥，当然，妙，可以，有道理，etc. When … Read more