So you’re marrying into a Chinese family. Congrats! Do you know what’s likely to show up on your bed on your Chinese wedding day? Fruit. Lots of it. Sound strange? It isn’t, really, once you understand why some fruits are associated with good luck and babies. So how did four fruits come to be seen as the ultimate Chinese wedding good luck charm?
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The Nincha Team and its newest team member wish you a happy Easter weekend!
Easter isn’t really celebrated in China but here’s how to say Easter in Chinese anyways:
Spring officially started last week, but it has yet to prove it’s not exactly the same season as winter in our parts of the world. So to keep spirits high until warmer days show up, we wanted to introduce one of the best water activities we’ve encountered in our travels in China : 竹筏漂流 (Zhú fá piāoliú), bamboo rafting.
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Describing your family tree in Chinese ain’t no easy feat: what you call your relatives depend on whether they’re on your dad’s side or on your mom’s side, and on the order in which each relative was born! So to make explaining your family tree to your Chinese friends a lot easier, we created this awesome-looking infographic.
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Liu Hui was the first Chinese mathematician to provide a rigorous algorithm for calculation of π to any accuracy. Liu Hui’s own calculation with a 96-gon provided an accuracy of five digits: π ≈ 3.1416.
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Eating out in China can be a bit disconcerting. New flavors and textures to discover, menus full of unknown Chinese characters and dishes…
And then there’s having the right, Chinese, table manners. Get used to it though, because with mom-and-pop restaurants in China usually being extremely affordable, trust us, you’ll be eating out a lot.
When it comes to New Year celebrations in China, it’s not the 1st of January that counts. It’s the beginning of the new lunar year that matters. The Chinese New Year is also known as 春节 (chūnjié, literally Spring festival). Curious to learn more about this Chinese New Year? Here’s a crash course in celebrating New year’s Chinese Style.
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Still too many people outside of China are wondering whether or not to join Weibo, China’s number one micro-blogging site. Why? Probably because they’ve heard – and I had too – a lot of (false) things about Weibo. Accusing it of being just a Twitter-copy for instance… Wrong. Weibo is a lot more than that, than just a wall. One of my favorite feature is being able to chat with my followers and getting to know each other. What a great way to build a community.
Besides, Weibo is a fascinating source of information from the people living and shaping, China. This also makes it a great way to learn Chinese, straight from the source. Read on to get onboard and learn our favorite ways to effectively learn Chinese on Weibo!
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Turning information into lasting knowledge is a science. Really remembering something is a science. And like any science, it requires great tools. One of the most effective memorization methods and tools? Spaced repetition. So much in fact that spaced repetition will absolutely be part of the Ninchanese learning experience. Here’s why we love it.
“People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.”
Samuel Johnson, an 18th century English essayist, pinpointed this important fact early on: a key to long term memory retention is being reminded.
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