Learn Chinese Blog | Learn to speak Chinese

helpful Chinese language learning tips and resources

How many characters do you need to read a Chinese newspaper

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 Read the full Post…

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

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 Read the full Post…

How to learn Chinese characters (p-1)

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. Read the full Post…

Chinese Character of the week – 糟糕：‘Oh no!How terrible’!

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!) Read the full Post…

Chinese character of the week:打针 -to have an injection

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 Read the full Post…

Chinese Character of the week

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 Read the full Post…

Chinese character etymology-History of every character

I came across this site and was quite impressed by what he did. Richard Sears made Chinese Character etymology available online after years of effort. Through his site, you can see history of any Chinese character.  You can see how each character written in different ancient Chinese character styles: simplified Chinese character (most common used), traditional Chinese character, Seal Character (篆体字-zhuàn Read the full Post…

Chinese Character Writing Competition – Top Finalists

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 Read the full Post…