My Rosetta Stone Chinese lessons proved extremely valuable a few days ago. My son—smack in…
Tag Archives: Chinese
Chinese Level 3: Nailed it!
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…
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Using Rosetta Stone Chinese to Go beyond Coffee
The first complete series of Mandarin phrases that I mastered after I moved to Taiwan went like this: “Wo yao yi bei kafei natie . . . da bei…
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Experiments with Motivation
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…
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Counting in Mandarin
Linguistics Breakthrough!!!
I’m a UCLA graduate with a Bachelor’s Degree in Linguistics. I’ve studied a variety of foreign languages for years, and…
Understanding Accents is a Two-Way Street
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,…
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A Proper Beijing Accent
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…
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Ni chi le ma?
I’ve noticed that there’s a bias toward food language in Mandarin. When you run into a friend on the…
Easy to Learn, Harder to Remember
Mandarin is a brilliantly simple language. The grammar, while rigid, is straightforward and practical, and it employs the familiar subject-verb-object…
