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
HSK 3 to HSK 4: The Wall
Everyone reports the same thing: the first levels came quickly and then progress slowed to a crawl. Nothing has gone wrong. The task changed underneath you, from recognising concrete words to choosing between abstract ones — and the methods that worked before stop working.
Yasmine Berrada · June 29, 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
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
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
The 把 Construction, Explained Slowly
Most learners do not struggle with 把 — they avoid it, for years, behind a set of workarounds smooth enough that nobody notices. Here is what the pattern actually does, the three rules that govern it, and the places where no workaround exists.
Nadia Haddad · April 20, 2026 · 5 min read
Study Plans That Survive Contact With Real Life
Every plan is written by an optimist on a Sunday evening and broken by a Wednesday. How to design a schedule around your worst week rather than your best, what to cut first when a week goes wrong, and why days-touched beats hours-logged.
Sofia Ouazzani · March 23, 2026 · 6 min read
What HSK Does Not Test: An Editorial View on Certificates and Real Life
HSK Guide’s editorial view, not a description of the examination’s design: a certificate measures a sample of a skill under standard conditions, and standard conditions are not living conditions. The gap we keep seeing, and what to do about it.
Yasmine Berrada · March 9, 2026 · 5 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
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
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
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 Many Words Do You Need for HSK? An Honest Answer
Vocabulary counts are the most quoted and least useful number in Chinese learning. Here is why raw totals mislead, what "knowing a word" actually means across recognition and production, and how to set targets you can act on.
Yasmine Berrada · November 17, 2025 · 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
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