Mandarin | A China Blog on Suzhou Expat Life

Posts Tagged ‘mandarin’

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n 22 20
08

ChinesePod affiliate program back up

ChinesePod.com, one of the pioneers for learning languages via podcasts, has recently relaunched their affiliate program, and I gotta say, it’s better than ever.

An affiliate program might not mean much to many of you, but I know a lot of folks that read this blog regularly also run their own China-related blogs and sites, and so I figured I’d help the folks over at ChinesePod get the word out about it.

For any that don’t know, ChinesePod.com is a rather hip podcast that delivers free daily Chinese lessons in a fun and contextual radio-show format. The podcast and…

Comments Posted in General, Learning Chinese

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n 06 20
08

What Neverbeens don’t know about China

Well, I’ve returned to my chilly Suzhou apartment after a three week refresher in the “real world” and am slowly getting back into the routine of expat life in China.

Though I still plan to post my wife Maggie’s impressions of Canada, that involves sorting photos and recollecting exactly what we did while away – time consuming endeavors. In the meantime, I thought I’d share some of the things I was somewhat surprised to find out people just don’t know about China.

By and large people in China wear the same clothes as the rest of the world: This

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c 07 20
07

The Chinese Alphabet – it’s not THAT big

For as long as I’ve been in China I’ve been told, and have told others, that the reason the Chinese language is so impossibly difficult to learn is because of its alphabet of 50,000,000,000,000,000 characters, each strokingly more confusing than the last.

However, I think it’s time to set the record straight. Comparing the number of different Chinese characters to the 26 letters of the English alphabet is a gross misunderstanding of written Chinese.

Though it is true that written Chinese has in around 6,000 “active” characters, to even be considered “literate” in China you need to be able to…

Comments Posted in General, Learning Chinese

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v 02 20
07

Why not to study Chinese at university

As some of you may know, I’m enrolled at Suzhou University (or Soochow University, SuDa) studying Mandarin. Having just completed my mid-terms, I want to give a bit of a summary on the problems I see studying in this way.

First, the title of this post is a bit of a misnomer, as overall I really like studying Chinese, think my teachers are great, and I really like SuDa’s environment. However…

Having lived in China now for a few years, I have a rather messy Chinese “level” in that my speaking and listing are pretty good, but my reading and…

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g 28 20
07

The Laowai Psychological Street Fight

I’ve always been a lousy liar. Remembering whom I’ve told what to is difficult for me when it’s the truth, but add in the complexity of deceit, well… forget it.

About five years ago my buddies and I started up a weekly Texas Hold’em game, and this taught me the “bluff”. Now here was a lie I could get into. It was limited in scope, non-committal, and expected. Sadly (ok, not too sadly) backpacking Europe and S.E. Asia got in the way of honing my skills to a Johnny Chan level.

However, over the course of time I’ve been “in…

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r 22 20
07

Put Down The Chalk & Pick Up The Language

My road through the Chinese language has been a bumpy one full of roundabouts and dead-ends. In the more than two years I’ve been here I’ve not had any formal Chinese education, and I’ve really no excuse for it.

I’m often praised and then quickly chastised by Chinese co-workers on my level of Chinese. When they first meet me they lather it on, but once they know I have a Chinese wife, their faces screw up and they try desperately to understand why I can’t speak better.

The truth is, nothing has hurt my Chinese more than having a Chinese…