It’s no secret: Chinese is a difficult language. Whether you’re planning to start or have already begun, here are some essential tips to help you get off on the right foot, avoid frustration, and enjoy the wonderful journey of learning this incredible language.
中秋节快乐！Today China celebrates its second most important festival after Chinese New Year: the Mid-Autumn Festival (literally, 中 [zhōng] means “middle” and 秋 [qiū] means “autumn”). It is also known as the Moon Festival.
Kanji is the primary form of notation, but particles, auxiliary verbs, verb endings, and some adverbs are written in hiragana.
These key components give us clues about a word’s meaning and make it easier to understand and memorize them.
The card game Dou Dizhu 斗地主 [dòu dìzhǔ] is one of the most popular pastimes in China.
Zhuyin, also known as Bopomofo, is a phonetic transcription system used to represent the pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese.
The Youth Chinese Test (YCT) is an international standardized test designed to assess the Chinese language proficiency of young learners in primary and secondary school.
The Japanese writing system is based on a combination of Chinese characters (kanji) and two syllabaries: hiragana and katakana.
In Chinese, we can indicate the past tense with either the particle 了 [le] or the structure 是……的 [shì……de].
Japanese has five vowels: /a/, /i/, /u/, /e/, and /o/, which are the most basic sounds. The consonant phonemes include /p/, /b/, /d/, /k/, /g/, /t/, /m/, /n/, /r/, /s/, /z/, /h/, /j/, and /w/.
One of the first things we learn when studying Chinese is how to say "and" or "with". But we soon find there are actually three different words that all seem to mean the same thing: 和 [hé], 跟 [gēn], and 与 [yǔ].
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