Tag Archives: advanced

How to Describe Medical Symptoms in Chinese

Have been inspired recently to do more research into how a whole variety of medical symptoms can be expressed naturally in Chinese. Here is what I have found between reading a number of books and consulting with friends, both laypeople and medical experts alike. Enjoy!   How to Describe Medical Symptoms in Chinese   描述一般症状-Describing […]

Another 45 Mandarin Sentences with Chinese Characteristics

(This post is a continuation from my previous article “45 Mandarin Sentences with Chinese Characteristics“.) The following is a collection of sentences in Mandarin which I believe are special in some way. What do I mean by “special”? Well, let’s just say grammatically and structurally they’re not exactly typical, and in most cases they stand-alone […]

Comprehensive Guide to Nouns Ending With 的 de

I don’t think you’ll find a list like this anywhere on the web, or in textbooks or grammar books. Indeed, I’ve read pretty much every major Chinese grammar textbook and do not remember seeing these nouns covered in any shape or form. So what is this post about? It’s a compilation of a very special […]

45 Mandarin Sentences with Chinese Characteristics

The following is a collection of sentences in Mandarin which I believe are special in some way. What do I mean by “special”? Well, let’s just say grammatically and structurally they’re not exactly typical, and in most cases they stand-alone as independent expressions. Plus, many of them contain elements of Chinese culture that set them […]

Clichés, Stereotypes and Euphemisms

Let me start off by saying that clichés, stereotypes and euphemisms have always seemed to me to be quintessentially “Western” concepts; it’s for that reason that I’ve been using them as foundations for lesson plans in my ESL teaching. These words, I believe, evolved after centuries of critical theory in linguistics, sociology and other fields, […]

Translation Challenge: “as…as…”

How does one tackle the challenge of translating the highly versatile and meaningful English construction “as…as…”? Find out as I break the structure down into its most common variants and give you translations with pinyin along the way.

25 Ghost Words (“鬼词”)

I’m particularly fond of affix characters in Chinese, and what more vibrant an example than 鬼 guǐ (“ghost; devil”)? 魔鬼 móguǐ (“evil devil”) – demon 懒鬼 lǎnguǐ (“lazy devil”) – lazybones 酒鬼 jiǔguǐ (“alcohol ghost”) – alcoholic; drunkard 醉鬼 zuìguǐ (“drunk devil”) – drunkard

Ventriloquists, Dummies and Ugg Boots

My new project is to do a weekly round-up of challenging words and phrases I have encountered translating both from English-into-Chinese and Chinese-into-English. I’ll present them here in this list and see if you can translate them without reading ahead first: ventriloquism 对…评价不高, e.g. 我对他的演技评价不高。 to hang out (with someone, at a place, etc) to […]

16+ Intermediate and Advanced Sentence Structures

I have been curious lately about more intermediate or advanced structures that might exist in Mandarin Chinese. Textbooks do list them from time to time, but it’s hard to know which ones are common and which ones are out of date. So with the help of 汉英虚词词典 – a dated but useful dictionary of Chinese-English […]