Learn to read a sentence of Chinese in 3 minutes!
汉字好学! Do you have no idea what that means? Well allow me, for a moment to set off on what might appear to be a bit of a tangent and all will soon become clear. I want to talk about the way children learn, and the way that I believe that they *should* learn. Since...
5 lessons from the way that a child learns a new language
Children learn new languages with enviable speed and ease. I think that everyone is agreed on that. The received wisdom seems to be that when a child is surrounded by a new language, they simply absorb it like an eager little sponge, emerging effortlessly fluent within a few weeks. So admired is this magical ability...
The Emperor of Dreams
Earlier this year, when I was desperately trying to enthuse my three year old daughter with the idea of leaving our rural Devon idyll and coming to live in Beijing, I took the arguably eccentric route of writing a lengthy mock-epic poem for her based on an old Chinese myth. However, my daughter was only...
Some thoughts on Chinese Tones
The tones in Chinese give rise to a lot of confusion and discussion. I am always trying to come up with different ways to explain them and different ways to think about them to make them stick more easily to English-speaking memories. Having received a recent barrage of questions regarding the tones, it seemed like...
The Master Calligrapher
Creating Memrise has caused me to do many strange things (taking my family, including two year old daughter and seven-month pregnant wife, to live in a yurt in Ed’s garden for two months is one that springs to mind, but there are plenty of others), go to some strange places, and to come across some...
The Real Wordplay of Ah Q
Yesterday morning I finally got around to plucking 阿Q正传 (The Real Story of Ah Q) off the bookshelf and beginning to read it. This is probably the most famous novel of the great giant of 20th century Chinese literature Lu Xun, and being an eager sinophile I should by rights have read it years ago. Indeed it...
Why does Memrise teach the meanings and pronunciations separately?
If you have just started to learn Chinese on Memrise, then the perfectly reasonable thought might have occurred to you, “Why does Memrise let me choose to learn either to read a character or to pronounce it? Can’t I do both?” It is a fair question, and one with (I think) quite an interesting answer....
