HSK Guide

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.

PronunciationGrammarStudy method

母语是阿拉伯语的人怎么学汉语

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 · 2026年7月13日 · 阅读 6 分钟

Survival chineseReading

看懂中餐菜单

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 · 2026年6月15日 · 阅读 6 分钟

CharactersReading

怎样查汉语词典

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 · 2026年5月18日 · 阅读 6 分钟

ReadingCharacters

什么时候可以不看拼音

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 · 2026年2月23日 · 阅读 6 分钟

CharactersMemory

汉字怎样才记得住

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 · 2026年1月12日 · 阅读 7 分钟

CharactersWriting system

简体还是繁体:你该学哪一种?

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 · 2025年12月29日 · 阅读 8 分钟

Study methodMemory

汉语间隔重复复习法

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 · 2025年12月1日 · 阅读 6 分钟

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? 报告错误 — corrections are made against the article and its version history, not silently.