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
Why Your Tones Collapse in Sentences
Your flashcard tones are fine. Your sentence tones are mush. That is not a contradiction — isolated syllables and connected speech are two different skills, and almost nobody is taught the second one.
Nadia Haddad · May 4, 2026 · 5 min read
Listening Is the Hardest Skill — and the One Most Learners Never Actually Train
Reading waits for you; audio does not. Why comprehension by ear lags behind everything else in Chinese, how to tell a decoding problem from a vocabulary problem in two minutes, and a transcription-based protocol that actually moves the needle.
Nadia Haddad · February 9, 2026 · 6 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
How these are written
The same editorial rules apply here as to the rest of the platform.
- Every article is versioned and attributed to a named author, and is reviewed by a second person before it is published.
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