In this video, I break down the Bing Chilling Song, translating its catchy lyrics and explaining the pinyin pronunciation for ...

To a non-Chinese speaker (like me), and especially to a Westerner (like me), Chinese is the most impenetrable family of languages on Earth. While there may be only an eighth as many syllables as in ...

One of my biggest frustrations with reading in one of the few foreign languages I’ve dabbled in is how long it takes to look up all the words I don’t know (which, admittedly, is a lot of them). It’s ...

There’s been a rising dissatisfaction with current language teaching methods in China, but scientists think they may have an answer. There’s no way round it: learning Chinese is tough. As far as ...

The goal of my new book Chineasy is to allow people to learn to read Chinese easily by recognizing characters through simple illustrations and animations. By learning one small set of building blocks, ...

When you learn a Western language, reading is part and parcel of learning to speak. In fact, you might even be better at reading than speaking. But not so with Chinese. “Learning to read and write ...

Recently, while revising for her end-of-year exams, my 15-year-old daughter came to me with a list of Chinese words, asking me to test her on them. It had been a while since she'd asked for help. Ever ...

For many Westerners, pinyin appears as yet another barrier to learning Chinese. The system of putting Mandarin's 407 sounds (each with four different tones) into Western letters, developed in the ...