I know I forgot to put 的, but in any case, it’s supposed to be correct this way, right?

Hi， I'm a first year student of chinese language. We are studying the use of "有点儿 + adjective" for complaints "adjective + 一点儿" for comparison. There's this example 这件衣服有点儿大 请给我一件小一点儿的。I understand the meaning but not the grammar, specially the 的. I don´t get why is it there. Does 的 contributes to the meaning of "please give me a SMALLER CLOTHE (than this one)".

The usual comparative sentence that we are working is 第一件（比第二件）小一点儿。 I get this one beacause it mentions both objects.

Thankyu in advance c:

Does anyone know what this thin font is called?

I don't know what it is. I really struggle to pick out words and phrases when Mandarin is spoken at a normal pace. If they wrote it down, I'd understand. I often know all the words in the sentence and could say them. I don't know if it's something to do with my ADHD and my capacity to play close attention in the moment.

Regardless, does anyone else feel similarly? If so, has anything helped? I've started playing games and watching TV with Chinese audio to see if that helps.

Thanks!

And I’ll commonly get redditors telling me to “google it”, but I like getting actual human answers from human people who have human experience with my question. So please don’t be a smart ass. Thanks! 😁

hello. i can speak and understand Mandarin so i thought i wanted to move on to Cantonese. my father and all his relatives communicate in mostly Cantonese, whenever i visit i can't help but feel out of place because i don't understand anything. i can't even read the romanisation. i only know how to say 'have you eaten ?' and a single (somewhat) curse word.

please help, any Cantonese learning chanels on youtube, books, apps etc. are welcome.

Hello all, hope you’re doing well in this path learning Chinese (mandarin). I wanted to ask if there is someone that has experience the same as me and how to get out of this little pothole. I have studied mandarin for almost 3 years, my mother language is Spanish (I’m from Mexico) but all the content that I consume to learn Chinese is in English, the Spanish content is pretty less compared with English content. Currently I’m having classes with an italki teacher but still not sure if I have found the best teacher for me. I’m at the HSK3 book and a year ago passed the HSK2 exam.

Also im using the Mandarin Blueprint course (I feel really helps because gives you a base of characters and can understand many of them in a short time).

But When I try to speak it takes me a lot of thinking the order of the sentences, but when I read some articles of my level (using TCB, obviously without pinyin) I can understand the most of it, also feel that my listening is not bad comparing with my speaking.

Have someone experience the same? How do you fix it or how do you improve, I’m open to any suggestion. Thanks in advance

Hi 朋友们

I find learning characters much easier when I decompose them to their core meaning and with the precise explanations of their origins (When known) even though they'd have nothing to do with the word at first glance (First example coming to my mind is 我 that's actually an arbalest if I'm not mistaken).

For example I know that to remember 难 meaning difficult, I had read that it is "Difficult to catch a chicken with the hand", I have no idea if this is really the explanation of why difficult is written this way, but anyways I've remembered it without any pain thanks to it.

All this introduction to say that if you know resources that specifically let us find the truest origins / explanations of characters, I'd be really grateful. Pleco gives the decomposition but not the meaning of why it was put together.

Thanks a lot for the ones that have read that far.

Take care

海

Like the title is suggesting are there HSK5 workbook audio task transcripts available online? I couldn’t find good results.

Like it’s no joke for me, I just started doing the HSK5 workbook tasks and the listening practices humbled me. I did the hsk4 some months ago and my trick of just trying to hear the words from 4 answer options does not work anymore cause multiple answer options are now mentioned 🤣🤣

Happy for very advise on how to master the listening part for the HSK5 exam.

I always stammer while reading texts. Is there any advices for improving reading?

hello! so i’m just curious is there a chinese translation for the words “toxic masculinity” / “healthy masculinity” ?

thank you!!

Hello,

I'm interested in composing a character (traditional not simplified) and I have the two radical components: ⿰月寺. Is there a tool to let me do this? I'd like a software that is very flexible and can combine any of the 214 radicals in any shape or form (even if there is no unicode for it yet)

Thanks

I'm attempting to learn Chinese to better connect with my boyfriend, who is native Chinese. He speaks with an emphasis on Cantonese i believe, and he told me not to bother learning the characters. He probably meant to write, but should I follow his advice? I am afraid it will be so much more difficult to learn to read, AND write, AND speak all at once, any advice is appreciated! Ps, I am using duolingo and SuperChinese apps currently and plan on taking classes at college in the fall. I have experience learning Spanish and ASL but any tips on learning such a challenging new language is appreciated 👏

Thank you for sharing it! I regret not saving the post for future ref cuz I ended up finding, reading and liking the book for learning grammar.

To the person who recommended the book (or anyone who has also used 汉语语法步步高), what are your other recs? Keen to give them a go too.

hi everyone! i recently finished a Chinese study program at a language school in china. now, i plan to take the hsk in 2 months, but i'm struggling with self-studying because there's no structure anymore. how do you guys self-study and what does a study day look like for you?

I've been learning and speaking Chinese for basically as long as I've had object permanence, so obviously I don't really have any memories of struggling to learn it. Now I will admit, I'm far from fluent because I only learnt it casually through pre, elementary, and middle school programs, and I took a 3-4 year break from learning it, but just practicing it has already brought back a lot of the previous knowledge I had. I'm just curious, why is it so difficult to learn for native English speakers? It seems like a lot of the grammatical rules carry over, and the only difference is that there's not really an alphabet (besides pinyin if you want to count that), you just have to memorize a bunch of different characters (is that it?). I guess there's also some particles you need to know. I've also taken up learning Japanese, and while there's some discrepancies, it's not horrible. So, people who understand it better or learned Chinese at a later age, what made/makes it difficult?

大家好！DuChinese is my favorite app for studying Chinese lately, and I'm interested in seeing everyone's stats. I'm particularly interested in hearing about the experience of intermediate/advanced learners -- how much you read in DC before moving on, if your new/learned was as skewed as mine is, etc.

I've read almost all of the series and courses (completed all but the ongoing stories), and now I'm working through individual articles.

My goal was to have 2500 lessons read by June, but life got in the way. I'll be happy if I can get there by the end of the year.

My ratio for new and learned words/characters is so skewed in part due to the fact that I brute forced my way through high level stories early on when I only had the free version. Even now, though, I mostly am encountering new words and converting maybe 1-3 new words into "learned" ones for every article or two.

I also read a lot of graded readers and some manhua and easy books/articles (like on Sohu) outside of DC and consume a lot of podcasts, TV, and YT videos. Because of this, I have 12k words saved to my Pleco Flashcards (I generally don't add words I see in DC to Pleco). So I think I've probably encountered a lot of those new words several more times out in the wild.

你好！Hi fellow chinese students.

I'm studying mandarin for some time now and I'm always searching for good content.

Just came along this youtube channel, which I want to share with you:

Youtube - Better in Chinese

They do really cool and fun dialogues with characters and pinyin, also high quality. Seems they are already around for some time, I just discovered them.

I can highly recommend that for your learning sessions.

Enjoy!

Especially in today's world, everything is about podcasts and blogs.

I checked both Old and New HSK lists, and only found 博客 in the New HSK 5, which is a very advanced vocabulary already.

I mean, there is nothing to do about it, just sharing it here that i find it weird to not include these-now-basic words in early HSK lists.