Good evening, everyone. I’ve just been reading an alarming news story over at The Chairman’s Bao, which has graded Chinese-language articles for learners of Hanyu. It is a story about a Miss Tang, an internet celebrity who was badly burned at a coffee shop. It is graded at Level 3 and I am most definitely…
Month: April 2018
A thick mist rises over the lake.
Hi everyone! Today’s character is 湖 hú, meaning lake. If you follow Heisig, it is character 156. Those three dots on the left hand side are three drops of water. It is the water radical, 水 shuǐ, in compressed or abbreviated form 氵 I have two versions of today’s sentence. The first is from Pleco, is longer and…
The wind howled through the trees.
Character of the day is hǒu. If you use Heisig, it is character 99. It means ‘roar’. You can make a couple of words with this character, distinguishing between roar as a verb and as a noun. Handy. Even if you are a beginner at Chinese, like me, you will probably recognise jiào because it’s one of…
Ninchanese
I’ve been looking for something new to stimulate my Chinese learning and this evening finds me avidly playing Ninchanese, a highly gamified application which you can use on the web or as an Android app. It caught my attention because someone mentioned that it teaches grammar, which not many apps do. This is important to…
The whole thing was a nightmare.
Character of the day is rú. If you use Heisig, it is character 104. It has a few meanings but the one we are concerned with today is the verb “be like” or “be similar to”. Here is today’s sentence. It’s interesting to note that 一切 means ‘all’, ‘everything’ or, in this case, ‘the whole thing’. We…
This gentleman will pay for everything.
I’m constantly looking for ways to refresh and consolidate my knowledge of the Chinese characters I’ve learned from Heisig. I nominally know 250 but I am prone to forgetting them if I don’t study and I need to connect them to other aspects of Mandarin, so from now on I’m having character of the day…
Choosing a Chinese name
Choosing a Chinese name is an elaborate business, as I discovered when I went down a rabbit hole of online advice and resources this evening. These are what I take to be some general rules: Choose one syllable to serve as your family name. Then you have an upper limit of two syllables for your…
Learning resources, 2018
For me, studying Chinese has things in common with exercise. When you are in a routine of doing it every day, it is relatively easy to keep on doing it. The easiest time to go to the gym is when you just went yesterday. If you lapse and let the hours in your day fill…
Returning to Chinese after some travelling
I did a huge pile of work and also travelled a lot in March, so Chinese took a back seat. I even took my Heisig book away with me and optimistically carried it in my hand luggage everywhere I went, yet my schedule was so full that I didn’t get a look at it. I…
The Hanyu You Want 