My students here in China often ask what they can do to improve their oral English. Memorizing a dictionary is all well and good for passing their college-entrance exams,…

Well, I’ve finished Chinese Level 3. The capstone is in place, the race has been run, and now I speak fluent Mandarin, right? Well, not quite—although, looking back, I…

In general, I struggle a fair bit with motivation. Add that to the fact that I speak English during my work as a teacher, and it’s no surprise that…

People in Leshan are wonderfully friendly. If you speak so much as two words of Chinese, they’ll open up to you, ask questions, make conversation. At such times,…

I’ve already been told half a dozen times that I have a proper Beijing accent. Not that I’m in any way fluent (or even particularly proficient) in Chinese, but…

Mandarin is a brilliantly simple language. The grammar, while rigid, is straightforward and practical, and it employs the familiar subject-verb-object…