SENSIBLE CHINESE · THE ARCHIVE
Language Toolbox
Today we’re going to take three tiny but important steps to rapidly improving your spoken Chinese. All three of these steps are totally free and will form the foundation of a great speaking practice habit. These three steps are: Step 1: Commit to...
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Uncategorized
If, like me, you love to travel, then this article is for you. My best experiences traveling have been interacting with people in their language, wherever I am. Whenever I travel to a new location I also try to learn enough to be able to strike up a conversation...
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Pronunciation
Most Chinese words are two characters, not single characters. The exceptions are: i) pronouns like 我， 你 ii) grammatical particles like 了，过， 吗 and iii) words with classical Chinese origins like 马 and 笔. Because words not characters...
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Phrases
I’m happy to be able to bring you another short beginner’s lesson courtesy of That’s Mandarin. That’s Mandarin have kindly provided these beautiful pictures to introduce some really important Chinese characters. Each graphic has...
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Pronunciation
Whenever you see the 3rd tone described in a textbook it will always be shown as a falling-rising tone. Unfortunately it is hardly ever pronounced this way. A much better conception of the third tone is a “low tone” but even that isn’t sufficient....
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Pronunciation
R is a bit of slippery Chinese pronunciation. At the beginning of words it’s very similar to the English “r” but with a slight buzz but certainly not as strong as a rolled Spanish “r”. Instead it’s somewhere between the English “r” and...
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Phrases
I’m happy to be able to bring you another short beginner’s lesson courtesy of That’s Mandarin. That’s Mandarin have kindly provided these beautiful pictures to introduce some really important Chinese characters. Each graphic has...
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Pronunciation
If you get the distinction between u and ü (explained previously in this article) then the distinction between Zh, Ch, Sh and J, Q, X becomes easy. Without understanding the distinction Chinese pronunciation can often seem insurmountable. This state...
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Pronunciation
Note: See the bottom of this article to learn how to get free human feedback on how good your u and ü are. Very useful! Boy oh boy this one is a doozy. That said, if you nail the difference between the u and ü sounds in Chinese then a whole bunch of...
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Pronunciation
Don’t get me wrong, pinyin is a god-send for early Chinese language learning. You can use pinyin to get up and running and communicating in basic Chinese much faster than if you had to rely on characters. However, the fact that pinyin looks like English...
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