Don't Homophone It In Last week we introduced you to the occasionally frustrating but always fascinating world of Chinese homophones. This week we're back with five more funny, sassy and potentially embarrassing Chinese homophones you definitely need to know! And of course, our helpful suggestions for how to ensure you don't get them mixed [...]
Conquering your Homophone-phobia Let's face it, learning Chinese is a constant lesson in humility. While studying a foreign language is never easy, Chinese sometimes appears to have been specifically designed to trip up hapless foreigners. And when it comes to spoken Chinese, one of the most difficult aspects is undoubtedly homophones, or words that [...]
A Quick Guide to China's Most Important Holiday The Chinese New Year, known in Chinese as chūnjié 春节 (literally "Spring Festival") is fast approaching. Since it follows the traditional Chinese lunar calendar it's also sometimes known as the Lunar New Year. This is why every year it falls on a slightly different date according to the [...]
(Chinese) Words with Friends Welcome to the fourth and final week of our Chinese starter kit series. If you've been following along since the beginning, we'd like to congratulate you on your perseverance. You may have given up on your resolutions to drink less and exercise more, but at least you're making progress [...]
Grammarly, Chinese Edition Welcome back to our third week of the Chinese starter kit! If you’ve been following along with this series, you should now be familiar with the two of the more unique aspects of Chinese, namely pinyin, and tones. Now let’s take a look at how grammar functions in Chinese. Broadly [...]
Tones, Tones, Tones Congrats! You’ve finished week one of our Chinese Starter Kit. With your pinyin foundation laid down, you’re feeling pretty good and getting the hang of things. This is the week we start really getting down to business, with tones! This week with tones we’ll continue with our course and apply [...]
What is Pinyin and do you know its importance? Pinyin is the foundation of Chinese learning. We know that pinyin is the official Romanization system for standard Chinese language learning in Mainland China. The Chinese language has 409 different sounds, and we can divide all these sounds into syllables. Each syllable has one of 4 [...]
Chinese Starter Kit: Introduction & Orientation Is your goal for 2018 to learn Chinese? This article is the first in our new "Chinese Starter Kit" mini-series that aims to give you the resources to start learning Chinese: all on your own and all from scratch. We've gathered the best free resources from around [...]
Supercharged Podcasts They say it takes 10,000 hours of practice to truly master something. For those of us who struggle with an attention span degraded by too many nights on Youtube, this is truly a tall order. And if that “something” is your Chinese listening, the idea of spending the equivalent of [...]
Discovering China with Hutong School, and Jerry At Hutong School we teach hundreds of students every year, and each person means something very special to us. Every one of our students brings something unique to our company, each an individual brick in a great big puzzle. You guys help us staying up to [...]
