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 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
Reading a Chinese Menu
Chinese dish names are compositional: ingredient plus cut plus method plus flavour. Learn about forty characters and most of a menu becomes readable — including the ones that lie, like the fish dish with no fish in it.
Rania Tazi · June 15, 2026 · 6 min read
How to Use a Chinese Dictionary: Four Ways In
Alphabetical order assumes you already know how a word sounds. With characters you often do not. Radicals, stroke counts, pinyin and handwriting input are four separate doors into the same building — and knowing which one to use is a skill in itself.
Mehdi Chraïbi · May 18, 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
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
Spaced Repetition for Chinese: One Card Per Word Is Not Enough
How review scheduling actually works, why Chinese needs separate cards for reading, listening and production, and the discipline that keeps a review backlog from burying you.
Sofia Ouazzani · December 1, 2025 · 6 min read
How these are written
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