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How to learn Chinese guide

1on1 Mandarin — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 11:23:21 +0000

Free Chinese language study guide available for download in pdf format. (please register first in Member’s area in order to download the Study Guide.) This useful guide covers topics such as learning strategies, learning styles, maintaining motivation, overcoming barriers, memorizing vocabulary, and other issues in the study of Mandarin. Now freely available online with hard copies available at our Beijing Chinese language school. Tell all your friends!

How to get a Chinese visa with the least amount of money

Darren — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 11:08:32 +0000

The other day, I received a friend’s newsletter which shared a very helpful tip about how you can extend your Chinese visa with the least amount of money. As a Chinese language school in Beijing, we often need to provide visa or extend visa for our students. Just last week, we helped one student extend her visa which cost about 1500 RMB in total for another 3 months visa, it took her about 2-3 hours to finish the visa extension process including traffic time on subway.

If you follow the way mentioned in the newsletter, it would cost about 800 RMB , however, you will need to take train and spend one night in Erlian. Below is the tip my friend shared and step by step information how you can get your visa extended.

—–

First, head to the Beijing Railway Station and hop on the K23 to Erlian/Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. It leaves at 8AM on Mon/Tues/Wed and arrives in the border town Erlian at about 8:30PM that night. Cost for your hard sleeper: about 148 kuai.

You’ll have to spend the night in Erlian, so head to one of the hotels across from the train station. Rooms range from 80 kuai to 150 kuai per night. For dinner, the “ganguo” (dry pot) at the restaurant near the bus station is pretty good (40 – 80 kuai).

Unless you want to see the sights (there’s a dinosaur museum that is supposed to be interesting), just hop in the cab the next morning and tell the driver that you want to go to the “guomen” (the border). Cost of the ride: 10 kuai.

You have to buy a ticket to cross the border (5 kuai). You then hitch a ride in a dilapidated jeep to drive you from China to Mongolia (50 kuai one way, which is unfortunately the “foreigner price”. Cabs can’t drive you to the border). You’ll get out and go through both customs, get your stamp in Mongolia and then turn around and enter back into China, where you hop in another jeep for another 50 kuai.

Given the limited return options for the train (it leaves for Beijing only late Thurs and Sun nights), most people opt to take the sleeper bus leaving a few times every day (220 kuai).

Total cost of your visa run: less than 800 kuai.

—–

My friend’s newsletter called Expat Package which is a weekly newsletter about life in Beijing. If you are interested in received more tips from him, you can sign up for his free newsletter here: http://www.expatpackage.com

Problem Capsule in China

Darren — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 11:08:01 +0000

Right now, one of the biggest news here in China is about Problem Capsule – 问题胶囊（wèn tí jiāo nánɡ ）which was being discovered recently. The problem is about corporate use of industrial gelatin production of hollow capsules. Here is one of most recent news video report on Problem Capsule：

If you are in China or coming in China soon, here are some Capsules found as Problem Capsule – 问题胶囊（wèn tí jiāo nánɡ ）, please try not to take them or take your own necessary medication with you from your own Country.

脑康泰胶囊 – (nǎo kānɡ tài jiāo nánɡ);

愈伤灵胶囊 – (yù shānɡ línɡ jiāo nánɡ );

盆炎净胶囊 – (pén yán jìnɡ jiāo nánɡ );

苍耳子鼻炎胶囊 – (cānɡ ěr zǐ bí yán jiāo nánɡ );

通便灵胶囊 – (tōnɡ biàn línɡ jiāo nánɡ );

炎立消胶囊 – (yán lì xiāo jiāo nánɡ )

人工牛黄硝唑胶囊 – (rén ɡōnɡ niú huánɡ xiāo zuò jiāo nánɡ )

阿莫西林胶囊 – (ā mò xī lín jiāo nánɡ ) - unfortunately I took some a few weeks before.

诺氟沙星胶囊 – (nuò fú shā xīnɡ jiāo nánɡ );

羚羊感冒胶囊 – (línɡ yánɡ ɡǎn mào jiāo nánɡ )

抗病毒胶囊 – (kànɡ bìnɡ dú jiāo nánɡ );

清热通淋胶囊 – (qīnɡ rè tōnɡ lín jiāo nánɡ );

胃康灵胶囊 – (wèi kānɡ línɡ jiāo nánɡ )

Have you ever thought you would put your life in such risk when you come to China?

Breathing in Beijing: Air Pollution in Beijing – Fact or Fiction?

Darren — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 08:20:24 +0000

A few days ago, I received a newsletter email from Beijing United Hospital which talked about some facts and fictions about air pollution in Beijing, since it’s a hot topic which everybody’s been talking or caring about, specially, those who are living in Beijing or planning to visit Beijing, I thought it would be good to repost it below.—–

Air pollution ( 空气污染 – kōnɡ qì wū rǎn ) is an unfortunate reality for all of us in China as only 1% of all cities meet the World Health Organization’s guidelines for healthy air. Beijing’s air is particularly notorious (and is worse than Shanghai or Guangzhou), but Beijing actually isn’t near the top 10 of the world’s most polluted cities. This fact shows that air pollution, far from just a China problem, is all too common in most developing countries, especially India.

Recently, the Chinese press greatly expanded their coverage of air pollution. However, there are still quite a few myths and misperceptions about air pollution, which I would like to attempt to clarify below. My ultimate goal is to provide the evidence so that we can make healthcare decisions based on facts, not fiction.

Fact or Fiction: A day of breathing Beijing air is like smoking a pack of cigarettes.

This is fiction. I often hear apocalyptic statements about air pollution, especially the idea that breathing Beijing’s air is like smoking a pack a day. This statement is a bit extreme. I did my own data analysis and found that the total amount of small air particles (PM2.5) we breathe each day is far less than one pack. In fact, it is only 1/6 of one cigarette. This amount of exposure is about the same as secondhand smoke. That finding surprised me, but I think the larger message is that any amount of smoking, even “light” smoking, is far more serious and lethal than living in the heaviest pollution in the world. From this perspective, perhaps Chinese public health would benefit more from drastically reducing smoking rates than from focusing on expensive industrial fixes to lower ambient pollution.

Fact or Fiction: Living long-term in polluted cities shortens life expectancy.

This is fact, but with many caveats. Living in any city with high air pollution does reduce life expectancy, but every city in the world affects your health in good and bad ways. Living long -term (more than six years) in a city with air similar to Beijing gives you a 32-49% increased risk of pollution-related death than living in a city that has perfectly clean air. It’s important to consider the risk in the context of compare this risk to other cities. For example, residents of Los Angeles have a 16% greater risk, while citizens of Paris and San Francisco have a 20% and 13% greater risk, respectively.

Fact or Fiction: Children’s lungs are more vulnerable to air pollution.

This is an unfortunate fact. The better studies, especially a few from Los Angeles school systems, have shown air pollution can cause small but permanent lung damage to a growing child’s lungs. This is actually my main concern here in China, and I hope all parents take this risk seriously and reduce their children’s risks as much as much as possible, especially by buying a good HEPA-certified (HEPA = high-efficiency particulate air) air purifier for their child’s bedroom. These filters, when used in small rooms with the doors closed, can filter up to 99 percent of air particles. I also feel that all school systems should have an air pollution action plan, which limits outdoor activities depending on the hourly Air Quality Index.

Fact or Fiction: Air purifiers are effective in reducing your exposure.

This is a fact, and that’s good news for those of us who feel helpless about air pollution. We tend to focus on the outdoor air quality, but don’t forget that we all spend about 90% of our lives indoors. Indoor air pollution is likely to be about 50-80% of outdoor levels. So while you may feel helpless about air pollution, you still have control over 90% of your exposure. That control mostly involves good quality indoor air purifier systems, whether stand-alone or built into your central HVAC (heating, ventilation and air-conditioning). I consider air purifiers a wise investment. These HEPA filters are rated to filter out more than 99% of all particles larger than 0.3 microns, which covers not only the most dangerous particles but also viruses, bacteria and many dangerous indoor chemicals. I’ve done some real-world testing on a few of the most popular brands and found that all models were extremely efficient in small rooms with doors closed, removing 95-99% of all particles. That means that even on “crazy bad” nights, your bedroom will be a safe oasis. Simply running a good purifier at night automatically decreases your lifetime exposure to pollution by one-third — in any city you live in.

To summarize, I’ve lived in Beijing for more than five years practicing Family Medicine, and while I do take air pollution seriously, I feel that my quality of life and overall health are very high here in China. Don’t panic. Acknowledge the facts. And be smart about air pollution.

To give the credit to Beijing United Hospital and Dr.Saint Cyr who wrote this post, here is the original post: http://beijing.ufh.com.cn/en/health-information/health-line/68/Breathing/

How many characters do you need to read a Chinese newspaper

Darren — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 08:00:10 +0000

When I first started learning Chinese then every new character learnt was a success. When I reached the 100 characters benchmark, I was really pleased, but I knew I had a long way to go because I had heard before that you needed 2000 characters to read a newspaper.

Well we have been studying for over a year now and we are probably able to recognise well over 1000 distinct characters with a good idea of both their meaning and their pronunciation. So, to have an idea of my progress, I thought I would have a go at seeing how much that allowed me to understand of a news article.

To do this I went to baidu news (baidu is the Chinese equivalent of google), and went to their international news section, and picked out the first two paragraphs from their leading article. Those two paragraphs are reproduced below. Characters highlighted in red are those that I definitely don’t recognise.

有关“中国要遣返数十名脱北者”的消息近日被韩国媒体热炒。据韩国《东亚日报》2月24日报道，韩国政府和在野党目前正考虑给在中国被捕并面临被强制遣返的“脱北者”发行“韩国民证明书”，支持他们的韩国行。

根据韩国政策委员长李柱英的介绍，韩国新世界党23日在国会召开了有外交通商部长官金成焕、统一部次官金天植参加的党政协议会，讨论了上述对策。韩国党政还决定，将向中国派遣朝野都参加的国会代表团，也决定向中国的“红十字会”发出请求，要求对“脱北者”的人道性待遇给予支持。

Initially the result might look quite encouraging. Only 14 characters out of 197 suggests that we can understand a remarkable 93% of the content!?

However, although each Chinese characters has a specific meaning, the majority of Chinese words in use today are not expressed by a single character but by characters in combination of two or three together.

For instance, the very first word in the article is “有关”. Most students studying chinese will be very familiar with both these characters “有” meaning to have, 关 meaning any of: to close, to shut off, concerning, or a mountain pass. But 有关 to me is a new word meaning “concerning”. Simple enough, but until you have learnt it, then it is as easy to wrongly read that as “have closed”, “have shut of”, or even “I have a mountain pass”.

If we look at the text again, but now taking into account which words rather than characters are new to me then a much more realistic picture emerges: characters which I don’t know are highlighted in red, words I don’t know in purple.

It is now clear that there isn’t a single sentence that I can completely understand. Of course, there are mitigating factors here. This article contains words relating to international politics that are not included in Chinese 101, and it also contains people’s names, which also aren’t of a first priority for a language student.

Overall though, I am encouraged. I could understand enough of the article to have an idea what it was talking about, even if I wasn’t picking up the details. It is also clear to me that whilst it is important to continue building up your knowledge of distinct characters, the language learner needs to also be building a much wider vocabulary using compound characters. Jia you.

http://news.baidu.com/n?cmd=2&class=internews&page=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.gog.com.cn%2Fsystem%2F2012%2F02%2F24%2F011354159.shtml&cls=internews

Christmas in Beijing – a 外国人（wàiguórén – foreigner’s） perspective

Darren — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 09:50:37 +0000

We had not lived here long by the time Christmas came round last year, but I don’t remember there being very much in the way of Christmas things about, a few small decorations, but not much else. So this year, we were not expecting too many things to be happening to remind us about Christmas, but we have realised that, in some ways, we were very wrong!

From a commercial side at least, it seems that here in the area where 1 on 1 is, Christmas is a fairly big thing. The first thing that gave us a clue was when various shops started to put some decorations in their windows. Then the supermarkets (超市- short for 超级市场 – well we are studying Chinese after all!) started to sell Christmas decorations and trees. Seeing lots (and I mean lots!) of shop assistants wearing ‘Santa’ hats is something we are finding pretty strange, but perhaps most strange is to hear the music that is played in many of the places we go, that certainly I as a westerner can’t keep myself from humming along to. The songs range from older classic secular Christmas themed songs to modern Christmas themed songs (What I think of as the very British ‘Do They Know it’s Christmas’ being the one I was most surprised by). There are also scores of traditional Christmas Carols (with great lyrics!) to be heard – perhaps even more so than we would have heard in shops at home!

When it comes to personal homes we, unsurprisingly, have not seen much in the way of evidence of Christmas coming. The only obvious Christmas tree we have seen in a home is in that of a Westerner. Speaking to some Chinese friends, some feel that Christmas is important, but for others, they like the excuse to get together with their friends, but beyond that it is not important. We have already been to two Christmas parties, with a lot of Chinese friends there, and have another one to go to yet, so this does seem to be true!

Inputting Chinese characters

Darren — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 07:15:44 +0000

If you are learning Chinese then chances are that before too long you will want to write in Chinese using the computer. Assuming you are looking for a tool that allows you to write in Chinese as easily as it to write in roman script, then what you are looking for is a Chinese IME (Input Method Editor).

Google has is own IME for inputting Chinese characters http://google.com/intl/zh-CN/ime/pinyin/, and like most things Google it works well. Once installed it is easy to switch between writing in English and writing in Chinese.

The key selling point of any Chinese IME is its ability to provide the exact characters you want. For instance if you are writing about a policeman then you will want 被警察 (bèijǐngchá) rather than 北京茶.

The Google IME appears to claim that it will do a better job at getting to the characters you want quickly and accurately, and from my experience so far it seems to do a very good job of it. It can cope with writing long strings of characters and analyse the whole sentence to determine what characters make sense.

One drawback about the Google IME is that it the software itself is in Chinese– i.e. the terms and conditions, the settings etc are all in Chinese (so not so helpful if you are still a rookie language learner). You don’t need to alter the settings to make it work well, so this isn’t necessarily a problem but if you are of a nervous disposition, or just like to carefully read all your terms and conditions then maybe the Microsoft Pinyin IME would be a better alternative.

See also the previous blog post on wubi and pinyin.

Learning by language bloopers

Darren — Tue, 31 May 2011 04:24:20 +0000

Today I was learning some useful cultural differences between China and the west.

We were discussing that in China it is not the done thing to lick your fingers (and I understand that you don’t usually eat with your fingers either – so beware if you are planning a buffet for your Chinese friends!). In the West while it is maybe not very polite to lick your fingers, at least where I come from people don’t really have a problem with it. In order to explore cultural differences a bit further, and to get some more spoken Chinese practice, we then talked about other things that you are allowed or not allowed to lick. I suggested that:

在英国你可以舔邮局

In England you are allowed to lick post offices!

邮 yóu – is the word for post, and 局 jú is the word for office

I eventually got it right

在英国你可以舔邮票

Where again 邮 yóu means post, and 票 piào literally means ticket, so together, 邮票 means a stamp.

Hopefully I haven’t left my teacher with visions of Westerners licking buildings! But this lesson will stick in my head partly because of the language mistake I made along the way…

How to study Chinese – Learning style

Skritter review – a great way of learning how to write Chinese characters

Darren — Wed, 25 May 2011 08:58:10 +0000

Learning how to write Chinese characters is hard, and we can use all the help we can get. Skritter (http://www.skritter.cn) is a website that uses some clever web coding to create a novel way of helping you learn characters.

The strongest feature of Skritter in my opinion is its tool for Chinese character writing with real time feedback. This is unique as far as I am aware. When you draw a character the strokes you have drawn ‘fall’ into the right place – so every time you make a stroke a little too short, or forget the hook, or make it too straight – it will show you immediately what it should look like, and then let you continue on with writing the other strokes. Similarly, it will let you know if the stroke is in the wrong order, or wrong direction. It will even give you a hint if you are completely stuck as to which stroke comes next. Using Skritter has taught me that I have been writing the liang of piao liang (漂亮 – beautiful) wrong for months. I had been putting 儿 for the last two strokes instead of 几, and skritter would not let me get away with it!

Skritter is full of other useful features that should aid the language learner such as an inbuilt Spaced Repetition System, Audio reinforcement, and character decompositions, and user created mnenomics (see http://www.skritter.cn/pricing for a full list). Alongside which the studying is very customizable, allowing you to focus on exactly what you need whether that is just writing, or if reading and remembering the correct tone are also important to you.

However, to be honest, I am not going to be using it beyond the free trial. Partly that is due to the monthly fee ($10), but also I have already been learning for a while and I have found a set of other resources that provide almost all the features that Skritter provides.

But if you are new to learning to write Chinese characters, then it could be an excellent place for you to start. Skritter is not free, but they do let you have a two week free trial to experiment to see if it works for you. Hope this Skritter review helpful for those who want to give it try.

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