Learn Chinese Blog | Learn to speak Chinese http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog helpful Chinese language learning tips and resources Thu, 22 Dec 2011 09:50:37 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 How to learn Chinese guide http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/announcement/ http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/announcement/#comments Fri, 11 Sep 2009 11:23:21 +0000 1on1 Mandarin http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/?p=351

How to Learn Chinese Guide (725)

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!

Related posts

]]> http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/announcement/feed/ 5 Christmas in Beijing – a 外国人 （wàiguórén – foreigner’s） perspective http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/christmas-beijing-foreigners-perspective/ http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/christmas-beijing-foreigners-perspective/#comments Thu, 22 Dec 2011 09:50:37 +0000 Darren http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/?p=1304 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!

 

Related posts

]]> http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/christmas-beijing-foreigners-perspective/feed/ 0 Inputting Chinese characters http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/inputting-chinese-characters/ http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/inputting-chinese-characters/#comments Thu, 21 Jul 2011 07:15:44 +0000 Darren http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/inputting-chinese-characters/

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.

 

Related posts

]]> http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/inputting-chinese-characters/feed/ 0 Learning by language bloopers http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/learning-by-language-bloopers/ http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/learning-by-language-bloopers/#comments Tue, 31 May 2011 04:24:20 +0000 Darren http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/learning-by-language-bloopers/

  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…

Related posts

]]> http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/learning-by-language-bloopers/feed/ 0 Skritter review – a great way of learning how to write Chinese characters http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/skritter-review-learning-write-chinese-characters/ http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/skritter-review-learning-write-chinese-characters/#comments Wed, 25 May 2011 08:58:10 +0000 Darren http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/?p=1269

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.

 

Random Posts

]]> http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/skritter-review-learning-write-chinese-characters/feed/ 1 How to learn Chinese characters (p-1) http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/how-to-learn-chinese-characters-p1/ http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/how-to-learn-chinese-characters-p1/#comments Wed, 18 May 2011 06:07:46 +0000 Darren http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/?p=1258

If you are a westerner then learning Chinese characters is going to be hard and require months and years of study. But there are many things you can do to make the task slightly easier. One resource that I have been recently using is a book called “Rembering Simplified Hanzi 1” by Heisig and Richardson.

It is not a cheap book, but the book’s subtitle tells you why it could be invaluable: “How not to forget the meaning and writing of Chinese characters”. You see it can be relatively easy to learn a new character, you look at it, hide it, and then draw it a few times and in theory you have learnt it – but the hard part is remembering that same character later on.

Now Heisig’s approach is slower but more efficient! When learning each character you will spend more time learning it than with the first approach, but you save time in the long run because having learnt it once you don’t forget it, either to read or to write. A remarkable claim!

A further claim of Heisig is that “if you were to study them full time, there is no reason why all 1,500 characters in Book 1 could not be learned successfully in four to five weeks”.

The key to Heisig’s approach is that he gives you stories that stick in your mind that relate the meaning of the character to the component parts. The stories are purposefully vivid and unbelievable, but that makes them very simple to remember, and as long as you remember the crazy story then the character is straightforward to write. Therefore his book systematically teaches characters so that new characters build upon the previously learnt characters.

Below is the link of the book 《Rembering Simplified Hanzi》on Amazon.

Remembering Simplified Hanzi: Book 1, How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Chinese CharactersLearn Chinese Books)

 

 

Random Posts

]]> http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/how-to-learn-chinese-characters-p1/feed/ 0 Chinese Character of the week – 糟糕：‘Oh no!How terrible’! http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/chinese-character-the-week-how-terrible/ http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/chinese-character-the-week-how-terrible/#comments Wed, 11 May 2011 08:16:18 +0000 Darren http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/?p=1253

My favourite Chinese character of this week:

Zāo gāo 糟糕

‘Oh no!’ ‘How terrible!’

Have I had a bad week? Well, no, not really, but I did have a ‘糟糕’ moment related to trying (and I use that word deliberately!) to bake a cake in a toaster oven.

Although it seems like a pretty complicated (or messy!) character on first look, breaking it down into it’s two parts really helped me…

Zāo 糟 on it’s own has a number of meanings, one of which is to be in a mess/in a terrible state.

Gāo 糕 on it’s own however, means cake!

Since more than one of my 糟糕 moments have been related to cooking, it seemed a good enough reason to have this as my character for this week! (More on the joys of toaster oven cooking another time!!)

 

Related posts

]]> http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/chinese-character-the-week-how-terrible/feed/ 0 Chinese character of the week:打针 -to have an injection http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/chinese-character-week-da-zhen/ http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/chinese-character-week-da-zhen/#comments Thu, 05 May 2011 04:02:07 +0000 Darren http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/?p=1246

My favourite Chinese character of this week:

打针: To have an injection

Dǎ zhēn 打 针

An odd Chinese character to have, you may think. But this is my Chinese character of the week for a number of reasons. Firstly, I’ve finally managed to learn it (for some reason, it has never stuck before, despite covering it first about three months ago!)

Secondly, I have had my first proper bout of illness since arriving here, so it reminded me that knowing some medical words can be useful (though I do realise this may not be the most useful!)

Finally, it is actually an interesting character. The second character, zhēn 针 has the metal radical next to something that looks awfully like a needle. So that’s fairly logical. However, when I first came across it, I already knew the first character – dǎ  打. Now the only meaning I knew at that point was ‘to play’. What it has helped me to learn, is that some characters can have multiple meanings (my dictionary gives 27 for dǎ  打!)  Slightly disheartening at times, but better than ‘playing’ at sticking a needle into someone, which was what I first thought it meant!!

(Non language aside – always good to make sure you have all your vaccinations up to date!)

 

Related posts

]]> http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/chinese-character-week-da-zhen/feed/ 0 My impression of cars in China http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/impression-of-cars-in-china/ http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/impression-of-cars-in-china/#comments Mon, 02 May 2011 04:09:24 +0000 Darren http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/?p=1233

If you have never been to China, or haven’t been here for a few years for those who have then the image you have of china might be a little outdated. Previously it has been a common perception of china in the west that china is a country of bicycles. But if you come to Beijing today, you see a much different picture. Car ownership is huge in China, but the surprising thing is not the quantity of cars – though rush hour around Zhongguancun has to be seen to be believed, but the quality of cars.

Around Wudaokou where our Chinese language school is based it is really not uncommon to see lots of new cars being well cared for, but as well as plenty of mid range cars it is reasonably common to see top of the range BMW’s and, Porche Cayenne and Range Rovers. This is a not the image I had of modern china.

China is such a large population with increasing prosperity that many a car maker is looking to make the most of this market, and this even includes the niche car markers. At the Shanghai motor show http://www.autoshanghai.org/en/ taking place this week both Ferrari and Lambourghini are advertising their latest cars to potential customers.

Language tips:

Ferrari:法拉利 (fǎ lā lì)

Lambourghini:兰博基尼 (lán bó jī ní)

 

Random Posts

]]> http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/impression-of-cars-in-china/feed/ 0 Chinese Character of the week http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/chinese-character-of-theweek/ http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/chinese-character-of-theweek/#comments Mon, 25 Apr 2011 09:25:30 +0000 Darren http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/?p=1226

饿 è

To be hungry

My favourite character this week has to be the character for ‘to be hungry’.

On first look, for such a simple pinyin spelling (è) the character is somewhat complicated, however, I found a good way to remember it is that when I am hungry, I want to eat. Breaking the character down, on the right hand side is the character for ‘I’ 我 , and on the left hand side is the food radical 饣, found in many characters to do with food. So really, it’s pretty logical…at least for this character anyway!

P.S.  if you’d like to see the stroke order of the character, please find it here

And the best way to remember this character is to  practice writing on your notebook or in your web browser by using Skritter below.

Learn Chinese Characters

 

 

Random Posts

]]> http://www.1on1mandarin.com/blog/chinese-character-of-theweek/feed/ 0