TL;DR Summary Chinese (Mandarin) requires a different mindset: you’ll need patience, repetition, and lots of exposure to tones, characters, and context. Don’t expect fast gains. Start with lots of listening and reading,…
Korean, Japanese, and Chinese—what are the similarities and differences between these three languages? How should we approach learning them? To what extent does knowing one help with the others? Based on my…
I studied Chinese in 1968. At the time I was working for the Canadian Government, the Ministry of Trade and Commerce’s Trade Commissioner Service to be exact. Canada was preparing to recognize…
The first thing about Chinese is that it’s not as difficult as people say. It has certain difficulties. I would say difficulty number one is the characters. It’s a lot of…
I lived in Hong Kong from ’68 to ’70, two and a half years, but my main task for the first year there was to learn Mandarin. Thereafter I worked at the…
