To learn a language effectively, nothing beats total immersion. The problem is that many learners of Chinese don’t live in an area where total immersion is practical or even possible, so a lot of learners help themselves along by watching Chinese TV shows. But in many countries, very few markets have Chinese TV [...]

It seems like the longer you study a language, the harder it becomes to improve in your ability to speak it. You get into a rut where you’re comfortable talking about certain subjects, and that’s what you talk about, so you hit a plateau. It’s really easy to get stuck on these plateaus [...]

The awesomeness that is Hong Kong: Reason enough to learn Cantonese.

A friend of mine just sent me a link to a New York Times article about how Cantonese is slowly dying out in New York’s Chinatown. I couldn’t help but get a little sad reading it. Sure, it’s a ridiculously difficult [...]

I just came across a great post on TheChinaExpat.com highlighting some common mistakes learners of Chinese make, and I thought I’d post about it here. The eight mistakes highlighted by the post are: 1.) Not mastering the tones, 2.) Not learning characters, 3.) Killing yourself learning characters, 4.) Focusing on progress [...]

If you’re going to rely on a computer translation to name your restaurant in a foreign tongue, it’s probably best to follow these simple rules:

Know enough of the target language to understand if your translation is at least somewhere in the general vicinity of being halfway near the point of possibly a tad bit close [...]