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 [...]

Learning Chinese is a pretty daunting task. The tones, the ambiguous tenses, the multi-use particles…it can be extremely frustrating at times. And Chinese people recognize that, so when they see someone working hard to learn their language, they’re usually more than happy to help out. They’re also usually really encouraging about students’ [...]