One of the things that I found most interesting about Chinese vocabulary acquisition is that the difficulty fluctuates over time as your vocabulary increases. Curiously,…
When I started to learn Chinese, I made a series of assumptions about my journey at the outset. Some of these assumptions proved to be…
There are four main skills required for fluency in any language: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Chinese is unique from western alphabetic languages in that…
After six years of studying Chinese, one thing that surprises me most is how atrociously bad at it I can be sometimes. I just assumed…
We have all heard it before—the secret to learning any language is immersion! Is that really true? I will share my own experiences with immersion…
One of the most difficult features of Mandarin Chinese is its tonal nature. Along with Chinese characters, tones are one of the key obstacles that…
One of the most common ways to estimate Chinese proficiency is by the size of your vocabulary. The Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK) exam, the standard…
The short answer is 3,285 hours. That’s how long it took me to be able to read Chinese novels extensively (at 98%+ comprehension), which was…
Over the course of my six years of Chinese studies, there is one skill that has most contributed to: (1) speeding up my overall language…