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8 Chinese Idioms to Impress Native Speakers
Every language has its own quirky sayings and expressions, but Mandarin has its own system of traditional idioms. They’re called chengyu and usually consist of four characters, which is why they’re...
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Mother, Hemp, Horse or Scold: When Tone Changes Meaning
Ky/Flickr Tone is essential to conveying the intended meaning of many words and can often be the hardest part of learning a tonal language. Tonal languages such as Mandarin (and many other East Asian...
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7 Gestures to Avoid in China
China holds a lot of mystique for many travellers, as an exotic Eastern land, with a completely different language, alphabet system, and culture. These differences can make it quite daunting,...
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The Most Popular Languages to Learn
If you’re considering taking up a new language as a hobby, you’re in good company: with more apps than we can handle to aid us linguistically, and organizations such as our good selves who are here to...
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The 10 Sacred Words and Phrases Every Visitor to a Mandarin-Speaking Country...
Whether you’re planning a short trip or a permanent move to a Mandarin-speaking country, you would be doing yourself (and ostensibly, others) a tremendous disservice by not familiarizing yourself with...
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7 Common and (Sometimes) Disastrous Mistakes of Newbies in Taiwan
The rookie ex-pat. Those that have lived abroad have been there: floundering, anxious, and overwhelmed. Like most jokes, it’s funny unless it’s happening to you. For the record, nearly every mistake...
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Health Care Abroad: Something to Consider
Photo via Wikimedia Several months ago, I found myself, once again, in a Taipei City Hospital emergency room. It was a fairly busy evening patient-wise and I was lying on a gurney in the far corner of...
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5 Things You Should Never Ever Do in Taiwan
Most travel guides have etiquette sections for Asia-bound travelers and would-be expats, and most of those contain situationally relevant advice for Taiwan, e.g.: Don’t stick your chopsticks standing...
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Taxicab Mandarin: How to Navigate Your Way through China
The goal of this article would be to provide some very basic Mandarin to be used in taxis by people who don’t speak Mandarin, however, “Taxicab Mandarin” is also an informal level of Chinese language...
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Singapore: The Multilingual Social Experiment
On our quest to seek out all the multilingual places in our world, our next stop takes us to a country whose city streets are said to be some of the cleanest in the world. So if you happen to find...
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