Learn Chinese Blog|learn to speak Chinese

helpful Chinese language learning tips and resources

The Digital Story of The Nativity

Posted on | December 25, 2010 | Comments Off

I’d like to share this creative, funny and cute story of the Nativity to say Merry Christmas-圣诞快乐！

How social media, web and mobile tell the story of the Nativity.
Christmas story told through Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, Wikipedia, Google Maps, GMail, Foursquare, Amazon…

Times change, the feeling remains the same

If unfortunately you are in mainland China, here is the video on Tudou

Comments: Comments Off
Category: Culture
Tags: funny > holidays > video

Tips on How To Prepare For a Beijing Winter

Posted on | November 15, 2010 | 2 Comments

Image from: http://www.snapshotjourneys.com/



As the cold winter weather begins to set in on Beijing, we’d like to give all of you newcomers some tips on how to prepare for and survive the bitter cold weather that we get here. The winter season in Beijing is long and arduous, and temperatures start to drop from the beginning of November, and only begin to warm up towards the end of March. It’s important to be well prepared from the outset of the cold season though, since the heating system doesn’t usually kick-in until the 15th of November in Beijing, but nonetheless temperatures can begin to drop to 0° Celsius in the evenings before heating gets switched on.


The temperature averaged -7° Celsius in December last year, and -9° Celsius in January, but this doesn’t take into account the wind chill factor, which can drop the temperature several more degrees. The weather here is not only cold, but also very dry, and chapped lips and dry itchy skin can also cause those with sensitive skin a lot of irritation, so it’s important to use some moisturizer and chap-stick to alleviate the irritation.


With all that said, here are some tips that will hopefully help you prepare for the winter season in Beijing:

Layering is important.

Wear base-layer thermal underwear, an insulating layer such as a hoodie, or fleece jacket, and then also an outer layer that will help to break the wind. Layering is also important because you can quickly run into situations where you go indoors and if you’re too hot, you can just take off your outer layer, but not expose yourself too much to risk catching a cold.


Drink lots of water, use moisturizer lotion, and also chap-stick.

It’s not only important to use external lotions, but staying hydrated in the dry Beijing winter also helps your skin to stay moisturized.







Neck and head protection.

Getting a scarf or a neck gaiter can not only help to keep the wind out of your jacket, but getting a beanie or hat can help to keep you warmer than you think, as about 20% of heat loss is from your head alone[1]. You can pick up a neck gaiter on TaoBao.






Despite the discomfort that the winter season brings, there’s a lot to do around Beijing during this time, there are skiing and snowboarding resorts not too far from the Beijing city, ice skating on several of Beijing’s lakes, and the Olympic park and water-cube is transformed into a winter snow park. Winter activities and recommendations will be another post though.

If you have any of your own winter preparation tips on how to stay warm in Beijing, please do share them with us!

1. Bookspan, Jolie. Healthline. http://www.healthline.com/blogs/exercise_fitness/2009/03/do-you-lose-most-of-your-heat-through.html


Comments: 2 Comments
Category: Living in Beijing
Tags: beijing > Beijing Winter > Cold Wear > How To > Keeping Warm > Living in Beijing > tips > Winter Wear

Learn Chinese Through Listening to Chinese Music

Posted on | November 5, 2010 | 2 Comments

google-musicA small follow-up of our previous post on methods on how to learn Chinese by watching Chinese TV shows, another way that you can improve your Chinese is to listen to and learn Chinese songs- and don’t forget to put it all to practice by going to the KTV with your friends!

There are many online music streaming websites in China, but one of the popular ones that I enjoy to use is Google China’s 谷歌音乐 (Google Music), however I believe that this service may only work for users who are located within China, as I know that users from the US aren’t able to connect to this service.


We’ll walk through some of the basic features of the Google Music website.

google-music-menu

Looking first at the search bar, we can see several options of searching for the music that you’re looking for:

In the search bar, you can search for songs [搜索音乐] sou1suo3 yin1yue4, or you can search the website [搜索网页] sou1suo3 wang3ye4:

[输入歌手] shu1ru4 ge1shou3: Enter singer’s name

[专辑] zhuan1ji2: Enter album name

[歌曲名称或歌词] ge1qu3ming2cheng1 huo4 ge1ci2: Enter song name or lyrics


google-music-menu

You can also browse the website by looking through the menu:

[首页] shou3ye4: Home page

[排行榜] pai2hang2bang3: Browse by top charts

[音乐分类] yin1yue4 fen1lei4: Browse by song genre

[挑歌] tiao2ge1: Customized selection

[歌手库] ge1shou3ku4: Browse by artist name

[私房歌] si1fang2 ge1: Artist’s recommendations


google-music-homepage

On the homepage, the main view lets you browse by songs of different languages:

[华语榜单] hua2yu3 bang4dan1: Chinese Songs

[欧美榜单] ou1mei3 bang4dan1: Europe and American Songs

[日韩榜单] ri4han2 bang4dan1: Japanese and Korean Songs


You can also see a listing of new songs, and popular songs of each language category, and on the very far right, a listing of the popular artists.

[新歌] xin1ge1: New songs

[热歌] re4ge1: Popular songs

[歌手] ge1shou3: Artists


Hopefully this gives you a good start on browsing Google China’s Music service, and will help you on your way in improving your Chinese language learning. [Google Music]

If you have any other popular Chinese music streaming websites that you like to use, be sure to share them with the rest of us in the comments!

Comments: 2 Comments
Category: Learning Approaches
Tags: advice > Chinese Music > Google Music > internet > Language > language learning > learning styles > mandarin > Music Streaming > useful

Chinese Character Writing Competition – Top Finalists

Posted on | September 25, 2010 | Comments Off

This past week we had a chinese character writing competition among our students at school. Students were allowed to write either a short essay, or just characters from their new vocabulary list from their lessons. After our students had submitted their entries, teachers and fellow students were given the opportunity to vote for which student had the best written characters.

Congratulations to Ruth for taking first place!

Chinese Character Writing Competition

Chinese Character Writing Competition

Chinese Character Writing Competition

For those who are looking to improve their Chinese character writing, one of the most important aspects is understanding the stroke order of Chinese characters. If you’re unsure of how a character should be written, most online Chinese-English tools will have an animation of how particular characters should be written.

The three most popular among our students is Skritter – a web app that helps you learn Chinese characters fast, nciku and MDBG, which they all show the stroke order of characters.

1. Skritter is a web app that helps you learn Chinese characters, with a focus on writing and vocabulary, using handwriting recognition and advanced spaced repetition scheduling algorithms, Skritter is the most efficient way to learn those thousands of characters you’re going to need to tackle one of these languages.  They stated that you can learn a new character every 192 seconds and remember 95% of what you learn. I heard very positive feedback from our current students, you can sign up for an account to use this awesome tool for two weeks for free, no harm to find out. Click to get your two week for free.

Learn to write Chinese characters


2. On nciku, you can see the stroke order of a character by clicking on the button to the right.

NCIKU Character Stroke Order

3. For MDBG, the stroke order feature isn’t as obvious, but you can access it by clicking on the yellow brush image to the left of the character.

MDBG Character Stroke Order


If you have any other tips that have helped you learn and write Chinese characters, please do share them in the comments!

Comments: Comments Off
Category: Language
Tags: Characters > Chinese > Chinese character > chinese character input > mandarin > Writing

  • Like Us on Facebook

  • Subscribe-订阅 dìnɡ yuè

     

  • Get updates via E-mail

    Enter your email address:

    Delivered by FeedBurner

  • Recent Comments

  • Write Chinese Characters online

  • Recommendations on Amazon

  • Learn Chinese in iGoogle

    Add "Learn Chinese" to iGoogle
    What's this?