I have been quiet on the Mandarin front lately. To be truthful I’ve really been very quiet since the beginning of January. A few things have happened that have kept me rather far away from Mandarin for the last 5 months. Goodbye Mandarin for a short while… Hello French… I took a planned break from [...]
If you’re new to learning Mandarin you may wonder whether putting effort into Mandarin’s crazy tones are all that important. Your teacher might give you plenty of pronunciation and tone exercises and really drill you a lot on your pronunciation. If you’re lucky you may even feel your stomach muscles tighten as you’re getting a [...]
Lately I’ve been dabbling far less seriously than I normally do. I guess you could say I’ve been taking a “vacation” from Mandarin. It feels great – if you wanted to know. I’ve also started with a French course which I may tell you about later but I won’t ellaborate on in this post. So [...]
At the beginning of January I did a post on my new years resolutions and I touched on the frustrations I experienced in using Anki. I don’t want to talk about my frustrations till you are sick of hearing about it. That is not my intention with this post. A few days after I made [...]
At the end of last year – call it end of the year blues – call it exhaustion – call it what you will but I felt sick of Mandarin, sick of studying it, sick of little progress and rather just sick of the whole experience of being involved in it. I even wanted to [...]
I’m not done blogging about fruits just yet. Really I just want to share with you some of the exotic fruits I’ve come across in countries like China, Malaysia and Singapore and I want to tell you that one of the BEST things about travelling or living in Asia is that you get to eat [...]
I realised this week I didn’t know how to say “Give me two kilograms of oranges please” in Mandarin as I didn’t know the word for oranges! So I thought I’d delve a bit deeper into fruits over the weekend and am sharing with you a few things I’m learning about fruit 水果 / shuǐguǒ [...]
At the beginning of this year I bought a small book ‘Making out in Chinese’ by Ray Daniels and as I leafed through it I found a section that dealt with Chinese zodiac signs and blood groups and how these two things are believed by some to “define personality”. It is certainly a well-known belief [...]
I realise that my last post was more than two months ago and I might explore that absence of posting in another post centered around motivation. Such a post though requires me to think a bit more about what I want to say so I’ll leave that topic for another day. In the meanwhile, I’d [...]
I’ve recently received a test invite from FluentFlix after I was one of the first ten people who commented on a similar post on the ChineseHacks website. I was really happy to receive the opportunity to try it out over the last week and my exact words were that it had “blown me away”. (It [...]
LOVE RSS? 
FOLLOW ON