Fed up with the humdrum vocabulary and the unappealing grammar? “Learning by singing” is an effective learning method, through which you can enjoy music, enlarge your vocabulary, improve your pronunciation and get to know more about a culture.

Beim Fremdsprachenlernen ist es üblich, dass man muttersprachliche Strukturen auf äquivalente Strukturen der Fremdsprache überträgt. Wenn man mehrere Sprachen beherrscht, dann ist eine Übertagung der Phänomene einer Fremdsprache auf eine andere Sprache möglich. In der Linguistik bezeichnet man diese Übertragung mit dem Begriff „ Interferenz“.

Chinese proverbs have two “layers”. The superficial message becomes obvious immediately. However, as you read it again, you will discover the deeper meanings from within. Listed below is my selection of the top 10 Chinese proverbs (歇后语/谚语). They show how creative the Chinese philosophers are and explain why the Chinese philosophers are seen as a [...]

The opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games began in the National Stadium, also known as the Bird’s Nest, in north Beijing at 8 p.m. on Aug 8, 2008. In the full-packed stadium, President of the People’s Republic of China Hú Jǐntāo and Jacques Rogge, the President of International Olympic Committee, rose from their seats [...]

The 2008 Beijing Olympics will start in three days (8th August, 2008), and some of my friends told me they bought tickets to see the performances live in Beijing. However, they didn’t know a tiny bit of Chinese and are afraid to communicate with the Chinese. Therefore, I tried to teach them a couple of [...]

My colleagues are always so curious about Chinese names and keep on making fun of my surname (吴 wú/ng) as they find the pronunciation “ng” interesting. So let me talk about Chinese surnames in this article. The Chinese surname is very different from a Westerner’s first name. The Chinese surname is placed before the person’s [...]

Tongue twisters are always a very effective and funny way to improve one’s pronunciation. Since Chinese is a tonal language, this adds another difficulty to the tongue twisters, because they also play around with in the tones while pronunciation eventually stays the same. Here is a popular and quite difficult example: 青青山上一根藤, qīng qīng shān [...]