Mandarin Weekly #18

Mandarin Weekly #18, with links to resources for people learning Mandarin Chinese, is now available at http://www.aweber.com/t/5eAIb.

To receive Mandarin Weekly via e-mail, use the form on the left.  Or subscribe to our Twitter feed, at @MandarinWeekly!

Please share Mandarin Weekly with your friends and colleagues who are learning Chinese.  Any and all feedback you might have is also welcome!

  • Investment words in Chinese
  • Keeping track of your tones
  • Mother’s Day
  • Backgrounds to some Chinese characters
  • Chinese fonts
  • How do order meat dishes in Chinese
  • Cat surprise!
  • 9 Chinese-learning Twitter feeds
  • Chinese house tour
  • When you swap characters, what happens to the meaning?
  • Do different nationalities have different accents?
  • When should you use 是吗 and when should you use 是不是?
  • When can I omit 个 (ge) ?
  • Asking for another room key
  • In 有所 (yǒu suǒ), what does 所 (suǒ) mean?

Mandarin Weekly #17

Mandarin Weekly #17, with links to resources for people learning Mandarin Chinese, is now available at http://archive.aweber.com/awlist3707181/BMq89/h/Mandarin_Weekly_17.htm.

To receive Mandarin Weekly via e-mail, use the form on the left.  Or subscribe to our Twitter feed, at @MandarinWeekly!

Please share Mandarin Weekly with your friends and colleagues who are learning Chinese.  Any and all feedback you might have is also welcome!

This week’s topics:

  • Negotiating over prices
  • Internet slang
  • Looking to improve your writing? Join the Chinese writing challenge
  • A Chinese song: “Take care of her for me”
  • 给 (gěi) vs. 替 (tì)
  • Is 以后 an adverb?
  • What characters have the same radical and main component?
  • Analyzing characters beyond their radicals
  • When do we use 出来?
  • I’ve now realized
  • Long time no see
  • The top n

Mandarin Weekly #16

Mandarin Weekly #16, with links to resources for people learning Mandarin Chinese, is now available at http://archive.aweber.com/awlist3707181/6vkVP/h/Mandarin_Weekly_16.htm.

To receive Mandarin Weekly via e-mail, use the form on the left.  Or subscribe to our Twitter feed, at @MandarinWeekly!

This week’s topics:

  • Tone changes for 一 (yī)
  • Chemical elements in Chinese
  • Approximately
  • Kitchen Chinese
  • Greetings other than 你好
  • Apartment hunting
  • Migrant workers and foreign workers
  • Types of teas
  • Mammals in Chinese
  • Modern catchphrases
  • Saying “I thought”
  • Typing onomatopoeia
  • What is 不起 (bù qǐ) doing in this sentence?
  • Almost new cars!
  • Why are Chinese mice and tigers old?

 

Mandarin Weekly #15

Mandarin Weekly #15, with links to resources for people learning Mandarin Chinese, is now available at http://www.aweber.com/t/P2IK9.

To receive Mandarin Weekly via e-mail, use the form on the left.  Or subscribe to our Twitter feed, at @MandarinWeekly!

This week’s topics:

  • Functional components of Chinese characters
  • Vegetarians in China
  • Organic food in Chinese
  • Chinese brainteaser
  • Most popular resources for learning Chinese
  • Smaller than 小
  • LOL
  • You don’t need to do that
  • Saying “Internet” in Chinese
  • Below-zero temperatures
  • Eventually vs. finally

Mandarin Weekly #14

Mandarin Weekly #14 is out, and available at http://archive.aweber.com/awlist3707181/DD2Xf/h/Mandarin_Weekly_14_April.htm.  You can subscribe via the form on the left, or follow us on Twitter at @MandarinWeekly.

Please let us know if there are any links you’ve found which would be useful to other students (and teachers) of Chinese!

This week’s topics:

  • Different Chinese verbs for the English word “make”
  • Using 一下 (yī xià) to soften your requests
  • Near and far
  • Choosing translation software
  • Colleagues
  • Sentence structure
  • Organic
  • Adding that final “a”
  • How important is stroke order when writing Chinese characters by hand?
  • Clients
  • Delivery
  • Quotation Marks (“”) and Angle Quotation Marks (《》)

Please share Mandarin Weekly with your fellow students and teachers of Chinese!

Mandarin Weekly #13 (13 April 2015)

Direct link to the newsletter: http://www.aweber.com/t/LJB5V.

Use the form on our home page to get Mandarin Weekly delivered to your mailbox each week, free of charge!

This week’s topics:

  • Thinking about tone pairs
  • How does that taste?
  • Reading challenge
  • Tough characters
  • Two chengyu
  • East is east, west is west
  • Learning to read Chinese in the digital age
  • What is 跟 (gan)?
  • But but but
  • Uses of 要 (yao)
  • Schools
  • Close phrases (看来,看起来,and 看出来)
  • Are you full?
  • Being bashful
  • Different types of beauty
  • Can

Mandarin Weekly #12 (6 April 2015) is available

Direct link to the newsletter: http://www.aweber.com/t/Fwhqb.

Use the form on our home page to get Mandarin Weekly delivered to your mailbox each week, free of charge!

This week’s topics:

  • The Chinese Pronunciation Wiki
  • 所以 (suǒ yǐ)  vs. 于是 (yú shì)
  • Using and understanding 把 (bǎ)
  • Sentence structure
  • Staying at home
  • Tomb Sweeping Day
  • Learning Chinese characters, through childrens’ eyes
  • Spring is in the air
  • What is the difference between 参加 (cān jiā) and 参与 (cān yù)?
  • Reversible bigrams
  • Why is zero represented by 零 (líng)?
  • 作 vs 做
  • Not bad!
  • Here’s the deal

Please share Mandarin Weekly with your friends and colleagues, via the buttons below. If you have suggested resources for next week’s edition, please send them to reuven@lerner.co.il, or tweet them to @MandarinWeekly.

Mandarin Weekly #11 (30 March 2015) is available

Direct link to the newsletter is here: http://www.aweber.com/t/KruvJ

This week’s topics:

  • What Are 形容词? Are They “Adjectives” or “Adjectival Stative Verbs”?
  • Uses and abuses of Chinese homophones
  • Saying “no”
  • Sound more fluent
  • Post-office words
  • Traditional vs. simplified characters
  • Present progressive
  • Fixing tones
  • What are the literal translations of country names?
  • The first five minutes
  • What does “x Shi x” mean?

Please share this resource with your friends studying Chinese, and let me know if you have any additional suggestions for resources!

Mandarin Weekly #10: March 23rd, 2015

Issue #10 of Mandarin Weekly is out.  You can read it here.

You can get Mandarin Weekly delivered to via e-mail each week via the form on the left. You can also subscribe to our Twitter feed.

This week’s topics:

  • Teacher-student phrasebook
  • Radicals vs. character components
  • Children’s songs
  • Be afraid. Be very afraid.
  • Improving your Chinese listening level
  • From east to west
  • Yes!
  • Pronouncing the “d” sound
  • Just a bit
  • Vocabulary building through tongue twisters
  • Common conjunctions
  • Is it rude to ask Chinese people to repeat themselves or speak slowly?

Mandarin Weekly #9: March 16th, 2015

Issue #9 of Mandarin Weekly is out.  You can read it here.

You can get Mandarin Weekly delivered to via e-mail each week via the form on the left. You can also subscribe to our Twitter feed.

This week’s topics:

  • Three steps to more and better Chinese listening practice
  • Want vs. need
  • If English were written like Chinese
  • Feeling well?
  • Wind expressions
  • Seemingly repeated meanings
  • Children’s videos for learning Chinese
  • Formal vs. informal characters
  • How to incorporate chengyu within your writing and speaking without disrupting the cohesiveness?
  • And and and