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.
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
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 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.
- No official vocabulary list, syllabus, scoring rule or examination date is reproduced or invented. Where an authoritative figure is needed, the article says so and points at the examination authority.
- Chinese examples are tone-marked and checkable, and are held to the same standard as the dictionary.
- A model may help draft; a model cannot publish. Anything AI-generated is labelled and cannot leave the review queue on its own.
Found an error? Report an error — corrections are made against the article and its version history, not silently.