2016 is the Year of the Monkey according to the Chinese zodiac. The Chinese zodiac is not only popular in China, but also in several other East Asian countries including Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Thailand and Mongolia. Some of these countries use the lunar calendar like China, while Japan and others use the Western calendar. This…
One of the best ways to improve your language skills in any language is to watch TV. For people learning English, there are many sitcoms available for learning to speak English in a natural way such as Seinfeld, Friends or more recently, The Big Bang Theory. The reason these shows are so great for learning…
Do Chinese people celebrate Christmas? As you probably know, the biggest holiday in China is during the Lunar New Year, which usually occurs around February. Christmas is not an official holiday in China. When it lands on a weekday most activities will occur in the evening. These could include shopping, dining, gift-giving between loved ones…
This year, the price of a Christmas tree in China is only half of last year’s price. The reason for this appears to be a new policy by the Chinese government, but before we look into that, let’s learn how to say “Big Christmas tree price reduction” in Chinese: So how cheap is it really?…
At Wuhan University there is a very famous and very clever dog. This dog likes to attend class at the University, and can even ride the bus to get there. After class, she enjoys running together with her classmates. She is very well liked by everyone, and everyone calls her 学霸狗 (xué bà gǒu). “学霸”…
Do you have trouble understanding what the announcement says when you ride the bullet train in China? In today’s sentence, we learn how to say “Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome aboard this train”, which is usually the first sentence in every train announcement. This is the accompanying blog post for our master lesson “Train Announcement“.
This is an image of China’s Official train ticket website 12306.cn’s CAPTCHA, with a text saying “find all the pictures containing red wine”. Can you find the correct ones? 12306’s ticket buying CAPTCHA has stumped a lot of people. The CAPTCHA does not use the commonly seen numbers and letters, but instead has the user…
In Chinese, the word for mistress is 小三. It's a word you'll encounter quite often in magazines and TV shows, so it might be worth remembering. In today's elementary example, a lady unexpectedly answers the phone when Little Ming calls his dad. Could the father possibly be having an affair? Grammar points In our second…
