When we first learn our native language in school, we spend a lot of time identifying parts of speech such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and so on. It might feel like a dry grammar exercise at the time, but when learning Mandarin Chinese, understanding these categories can become an incredibly powerful tool for mastering…
Mandarin Chinese is famous (or infamous) for its tones. Most learners are taught the four main tones early on, but what often gets overlooked are the tone change rules, those sneaky adjustments native speakers make when tones collide in real-world speech. These changes, called tone sandhi (变调 biàn diào,) are not only natural but essential…
What separates someone who can “get by” in Mandarin from someone who speaks with clarity, confidence, and cultural depth? Often, it’s not vocabulary size or even pronunciation, it’s the use of what I like to call the hidden markers of mastery: idioms and classifiers. As a native English speaker who has studied Mandarin for over…
Mandarin Chinese is, without a doubt, one of the most difficult languages to learn for non-native speakers, more especially for those whose mother tongue is one of the Latin-based European languages such as English, Spanish, French, Italian, etc. These languages could not be more different from Mandarin, but learning and mastering Mandarin is absolutely possible…
My Experience with 了 I myself as a native English speaker was caught off guard when first learning about 了 and its proper grammatical use when writing and speaking Chinese. 了 has several use cases, the most common one expressing the completion of a specific action, whether it be at a point in the past…
