Understanding The Difference Between Pinyin and Zhuyin This is a guest blog post from TutorMandarin “Your Online Mandarin Tutor” - a 1-on-1 Mandarin Chinese teaching service that uses professional tutors and student-focused lessons to get students speaking Chinese as quickly as possible. Free download on mobile app and PC [...]
Lost in Translation By the time you leave China, you might have picked up on quite a few useful Chinese words that sadly don't have an English equivalent. This is fine if you're surrounded by friends who are learning Chinese, however when you return home, you might find yourself in quite a pickle. Here are some [...]
Can you decipher the code? A lot of the textual Chinese lingo used by locals is made up of numbers. While this appears to be some kind of code, all you have to do is simply sound out the numbers (add a bit of a Beijing accent, meaning an "-er" at the end of each [...]
We Have Won An Award! We are super proud to learn that we have won an iStudy Global Cultural Excellence Award! Here at Hutong School we believe that learning Mandarin is about more than understanding the language. It's about understanding the Chinese culture! Getting to know the Chinese cuisine, experiencing a night out with KTV, playing Mahjong, [...]
Not Your Average Summer Camp Picture this: your bags are at the door, you turn around and wave goodbye to your family as you head off to summer camp, except this time you aren’t heading to a cabin in the woods - you’re headed to China. This is not your average summer [...]
Have you ever considered taking a year just for yourself? A year in which you will get the chance to explore who you are, what you want to do and who you want to become? A year that can be filled with new adventures, exploring unknown territories and most important of all a year where [...]
What is the HSK? HSK (新汉语水平考试) is a Chinese language exam measuring the taker’s language proficiency according to six standardized levels. The test is a good opportunity to see how well you are doing with your Chinese, to challenge yourself into a more intensive learning mode and to compare your level with those of other [...]
A new global market study has shown higher growth rates than expected for Chinese language learners. The founders of Hutong School, Mr. Jeremie Rossignol and Mr. Jan Wostyn, announced the results of the study which showed substantial growth in the number of learners both within China and globally. As numbers of Chinese students continue to grow [...]
Is there a logic behind Chinese characters? For a Chinese learner who has just started to get introduced to characters, the combination of strokes seems arbitrary at best and ridiculous at worst, without any major logic behind. However, that is far from true. A very long time ago, characters were actually often images of the object or an [...]
Embarking on a new language is not too different from scaling a mountain. You start at the very bottom, looking up and the whole thing is towering above you. You cannot even see the top as it is covered in clouds and you are asking yourself what on earth was I thinking, can I really [...]
