How Mandarin is actually learned
Long pieces on method: what tones really are, why word counts mislead, how review scheduling works, and what an examination does and does not measure. Written by the editorial team, reviewed before publication, and revised rather than quietly deleted.
Learning Chinese as a French Speaker: What Transfers and What Interferes
French gives you one of the hardest Mandarin vowels for free, and then takes back the interest with phrase-final stress, a missing h, and twelve years of conjugation habits. An honest inventory for francophone learners.
Sofia Ouazzani · July 27, 2026 · 6 min read
Learning Chinese as an Arabic Speaker: What Transfers and What Interferes
Your first language is not a neutral starting point. Some of what Arabic gave you is a genuine head start in Mandarin — and some of it will quietly produce the same three errors for years. Here is an honest inventory of both.
Nadia Haddad · July 13, 2026 · 6 min read
Chinese Has No Conjugation — And That Is the Hard Part
No tenses, no persons, no agreement, no irregular verbs. The relief lasts about three weeks. Then you discover that what replaces conjugation is a system of aspect, time words and context that is genuinely harder than an endings table.
Sofia Ouazzani · June 1, 2026 · 6 min read
Reading Chinese Without Pinyin: How and When to Drop the Training Wheels
Pinyin does several jobs well and one job badly: sitting under characters forever. Why annotated text quietly prevents reading, what pinyin is genuinely for, and a five-step ladder off it that does not throw you into the deep end.
Sofia Ouazzani · February 23, 2026 · 6 min read
The Measure Word Problem: Why 个 Is Not Always Safe
You cannot count a noun in Chinese without a measure word, and the general-purpose one covers less ground than beginners hope. The dozen that handle most of daily life, the traps inside them, and how to store a measure word so it arrives with the noun.
Nadia Haddad · January 26, 2026 · 5 min read
How to Remember Chinese Characters: Components, Phonetic Series and Honest Mnemonics
Most people who "cannot remember characters" are trying to memorise something they have never analysed. Components, phonetic series, mnemonics that hold up against mnemonics that collapse — and an honest account of where copying by hand still earns its place.
Mehdi Chraïbi · January 12, 2026 · 7 min read
Simplified or Traditional: Which Should You Learn?
Not a verdict but a decision procedure. Which regions use which script, why reading across is much cheaper than writing across, the one-to-many mapping that trips learners up (后/後, 干/乾/幹), and how to choose based on where you actually intend to be.
Mehdi Chraïbi · December 29, 2025 · 8 min read
How to Learn Chinese Tones (When Your Language Does Not Have Them)
Tones are not decoration and they are not an accent you can add later — they are part of the word. Here is why they feel impossible at first, and a practice protocol built on minimal pairs, tone pairs and recording yourself.
Nadia Haddad · November 3, 2025 · 7 min read
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