Tag Archives: formal

12 Basic Cohesive Devices in Formal English Writing (with Chinese translation)

I wrote this blog entry mainly for my Chinese students who have trouble with some basic cohesive devices in English – e.g. firstly/at first, lastly/at last, finally/ultimately, etc. However the word and sentence translations here I’m sure will also be helpful for Chinese learners. This is not supposed to be a comprehensive list of formal [...]

74 Switch-Around Words in Mandarin

One unique phenomenon that learners of Chinese occasionally face is the accidental “swap-around” of double-syllable words when talking (and sometimes writing too). Because the vast majority of words in Mandarin are formed using two different characters, our brains will sometimes remember the word well enough but have trouble remembering which character goes before the other. [...]