Sensible Chinese

Chinese Characters with That’s Mandarin: 白，酒，盘，饭，狗

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...

sensiblechineseJun 15Comments Disabled

Pronunciation

Chinese Pronunciation – Zh/J, Ch/Q, Sh/X and why we learn these incorrectly

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...

sensiblechineseJun 06Comments Disabled

Pronunciation

Chinese Pronunciation: The difference between U and Ü

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...

sensiblechineseJun 05Comments Disabled

Pronunciation

Chinese Pronunciation : Pinyin is Not English

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...

sensiblechineseJun 04 beginner, pronunciation, speaking, waichinese Comments Disabled

Phrases

Chinese Phrases with That’s Mandarin: Verbs 爱 / 看

I’m happy to be able to bring you another short beginner’s lesson courtesy of That’s Mandarin. Today we’ll be using a few key verbs to create some short phrases like 我爱看书；我看书；我爱买书；爱好；看好 That’s...

sensiblechineseJun 03Comments Disabled

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All Chinese characters are made up of the same 200 Chinese radicals!

This is part of our How to Learn Chinese. Check out the How to Learn Chinese series to get...
Common Chinese Characters you’ve been Reading Wrong!

Kyle@Sensible: This is a guest post by John Renfroe of Outlier Linguistics. They are working on a very...
Tone Pair Drills: The Single Best Method for Learning Chinese Tones

If I was allowed to only use one practice method to learn Mandarin Chinese tones it would be this: tone...
Learning Chinese Characters | Different Methods

Other experts have come up with their own answers to the question of “how to learn Chinese characters”. There...
Sensible Character Learning System – Welcome!

Hi there! This page is now out of date. Check out the Chinese Character Learning System in all its glory...