• Do I need to learn to write Chinese characters?
• When is the best time to begin with them?
• Where do you start?
• How do you write Chinese characters? Are there any rules?

With this article, I want to share a bit of my experience in writing characters and maybe a helpful additional way of learning Chinese. To be clear, I’m not talking about the art of Chinese Calligraphy but just casual hand-writing. Handwritten Chinese with a pen a piece of paper.

Do I need to learn to write Chinese characters?

Learning a language, in general, is split into 4 parts. Each with different importance:  Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing. I think everyone would agree that Listening and Speaking are the most important. After that comes reading, and at the end is writing as the least important part. Also, if the language is similar to your mother-tongue, then writing and reading becomes just a byproduct, because you already can read and write the words, even if you don’t know the meaning.  

The question if you need to learn to write Chinese characters is the most common one, and honestly, it’s not necessary to learn handwritten Chinese. But learning how to write Chinese characters can help and provide another supporting method to learn them if you are into writing. 

Before jumping into the subject, let’s take a look at the reasons why you may not need to learn to write Chinese characters. 

 When is the best time to start learning to write Chinese characters? 

Since I started learning Chinese, I also started writing Chinese characters every day as an additional way to learn words, after the switch from pinyin only to Chinese characters. For me, all of the above points go very well together. Learning to write Chinese character reinforce my understanding of characters.

So, I would say this is also the best time to start writing Chinese characters: right from the beginning. Everyone has to go through the elementary pronunciation- and pinyin-only classes before entering the tough world of Chinese characters, so the best way is when everything goes hand-in-hand. But it’s also not too late to start with it if you are already on a higher level. You just need some patience, persistence, and a good learning strategy. 

But since everyone learns differently, has their methods and is not necessarily that interested in the world of Chinese characters, this totally depends on your preferences.

Ninchanese is an incredible app for learning Chinese!

” I actually graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a MA in Chinese.
I’ve used Ninchanese daily, and it has helped me a lot!  “

 – Connor, Ninchanese User

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How do I start learning writing Chinese characters?

The material

When I started with hand-writing Chinese, I tried different methods to find what worked best for me.  

So, first things first: Basically, what you need is just a pen, something to write on, some words you want to practice and a dictionary/app which can show you the stroke-orders and directions. 

The plan

Sounds simple and easy but there are some factors you have to ask yourself: 

• How often do you want to practice (daily, every 2 days, weekly, bi-weekly?) 
• When you practice, how much time do you want to spend? 
• How many characters do you want to write, and how to choose what to write? 
• Why do you want to practice these characters? 
• When do you know that you practiced enough and need to drill new characters? 

And as mentioned above, it’s not about Calligraphy, but casual handwriting. So, don’t spend too much time and money in searching for the best pen and paper. In my opinion, that doesn’t matter that much; you just need to feel comfortable when writing. The only thing which has at least a small impact is the paper.  

My own routine

For me, the paper affects a lot of those questions above. You’ll get that later, first I’ll show you my personal answers on the questions:  

• I want to write characters daily as part of my learning-routine (this needs persistence), but I also don’t want to spend too much time (<20 min daily).   
• I’m learning with different materials: Chinese classes, books, Apps (mostly Ninchanese), etc. I usually pick the words I write from those materials. E.g., I’m learning a new unit in a book or started to learn some new words on Ninchanese; then, I’ll also use these words to practice writing Chinese characters. This way, everything is learned together and can be connected.  

The role of the paper 

To answer the other questions, at this point, the paper comes in:   

I’m using those small vocabulary-notebooks, which are exactly what I need: 

Both of them are pretty much the same. It’s just different manufacturers, and the 田格本 had one row less than the 田字簿。 

So, based on these notebooks, I decided to write one page every day, which answers the questions of how much time to spent and how many characters to write:

• One page is one day 
• One line is one word (can be 1 to 4 characters), which currently is 12 words/phrases 
• On the left side, I write the pinyin, so I know what to write. To keep track of how long I have to practice a word until I know it, I write a point on the right side, and if I had this word right for at least 3 days, I’ll exchange it with a new character. 

Does stroke order matter in chinese? The list of Strokenames of Chinese character

All types of strokes have names by themselves, but you don’t have to remember all of those. Even in casual Chinese language, these are rarely known. There are some which are also very rarely used, only in a few characters.

I picked this sheet up in the past for a class once and translated the names, so you can imagine where their names come from: 

Writing Right-/Lefthanded: 

You may have heard that the majority of Chinese people are right-handed. It’s a tradition to train left-handed people to use their right hand. So, why do I mention it? I am lefthanded, which leads to a minor problem when writing these characters.  

When you look at the stroke orders and directions, these are defined rules and these essential when you write with an ink-pen or brush, because you have to press down and lift the pen at the end, so it leaves a specific line-thickness at the end or beginning.   

When casually writing Chinese characters, a right-handed person would drag the pen in the direction he writes and leaves the words, but a left-handed person has to push the pen and would always smear his left-hand over the just written words. So, using a lot of ink will always result in a big mess, but it also feels very uncomfortable when you have to push a pen to create horizontal strokes (try to push a pen over paper, you’ll see). And here again, I have to mention it’s just about casual handwriting, so to feel comfortable writing Chinese characters, I write horizontal lines from right to left instead of the other direction.  

A short personal story about that: One time in school, I had to write characters on the whiteboard in front of the teacher, and it was the first time I had to do that. So, I just wrote like I was comfortable with dragging horizontal lines from right to left. In the end, my teacher smiled and said that the written characters are 100% correct, but the way I wrote was not that accurate, and I explained that I knew but did so because I use my left hand, and it feels more comfortable that way. This was hard to understand for him, and it still is for a lot of (righthanded) people when I explain it. 

Final words 

Since that episode with the teacher, I’m still doing my writing-practice how I feel comfortable, but I also know the proper way, and whenever I have to write in front of a teacher, I’ll write how it is intended, even if it’s not comfortable for me. 

So, saying that, I hope this article provides some useful tips and answers to some questions which prevented you from writing Chinese characters. It doesn’t take much, so why not just give it a try? Who knows, you may get the hang of it and it becomes a routine in your daily life.

 Stefan and 

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The quest to make learning Chinese characters easy

Chinese characters are consistently cited as one of the hardest things in Chinese by learners, and it’s not hard to understand why.

Haven’t you ever felt stuck trying to read a text in Chinese? Characters can sometimes be seen as impenetrable fortresses, yielding no clue whatsoever as to what they mean or can be pronounced. We’ve all experienced that feeling at one point or another of our learning journey. However, we also know it doesn’t have to be that way.

And so at Ninchanese, we are always on the lookout for new ways to make learning Chinese characters easier and faster, breakthroughs that make learning Chinese characters an easier task.

A learning order to organize them all?

When we chanced upon Loach and Wang’s study on how best to learn Chinese characters and words, we were astonished by their discoveries and the new algorithm they used.

Loach & Wang have decided to join forces and built a mathematically sound, logical approach to the order in which Chinese characters should be learned, based on data. Harnessing machine learning, network theory, and cognitive science, the two researchers built an algorithm to lower the cost of learning new Chinese characters ( = making it easier for you to learn them, what’s not to love?). How? By presenting them in an intelligent way. Intelligent because it takes into account a number of elements that are at the heart of Chinese characters and the Chinese language. Elements such as word and character frequency, the hierarchical structure of characters, the components they are made of, and several other variables, all mixed together to devise an optimal learning order. For you, little dragon.

The order in which you’ll be learning Chinese characters is optimal in that it goes back to the big bang of Chinese. To the roots of the language, to seek out an order and structure in the way Chinese characters are built. To help you understand the logic behind Chinese characters because once you learn to do that, it becomes easier and faster for you to learn new characters based on the ones you know.

Optimal also in that it strives to cost you the least learning effort possible. By making connections between characters and teaching you the ones, you need to know first. So it’s easier for you and a faster process. That’s why it can rocket fuel your character acquisition.

We just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to introduce this new approach to you. And so… We’re very excited to bring you an all-new world that goes back to the Big Bang of Chinese characters!

Your key: a whole new world on Ninchanese

Yes, we’ve created a brand new world solely dedicated to learning Chinese characters in this new order: the Universe of Chinese characters. 5000 whopping characters and words to learn in a science-backed, magic-fueled world.

100% focused on Chinese characters and fully based on this scientific research, this world promises to present you Chinese characters to learn in the most efficient order possible, backed up with the SRS power of Ninchanese for lasting memorization. It’ll highlight the link(s) between characters, their governing logic and, through that, will take you through thousands of Chinese characters and words. This world is nothing like you have seen before and
we hope you’ll have a blast learning Chinese characters this way.

The Big Bang question asked here is: How can we learn Chinese characters faster?

At the core of this new level, and the research that is its foundation, is a single desire: to maximize your learning efficiency in Chinese. Because here’s a secret: learning Chinese characters is often viewed as daunting, but when Chinese characters make sense, they become dramatically easier to learn.

In other words, the more components and Chinese characters you learn, the easier and faster it becomes for you to learn new characters based on the ones you know. It’s a breakthrough in how the Chinese characters are learned. You can read the result of this research here.

Maximizing your learning efficiency to increase your character retention while costing you the least effort possible, thanks to a cool new algorithm. Sounds appealing, right? But how does it work, and what does that mean? Let us take you through the new world’s way of working.

Let’s take a macro view: Chinese Language Big Data

There are, as you know, a ton of Characters in the Chinese language. They all contain a large amount of information if you know what to look for.  Information such as the character meaning components and phonetic components that make characters up, and plenty more.
We need to extract all of this information, figure out their connections, and use these relationships to build a logical order.  By understanding the logic behind the way Chinese characters are built, you can devise an order in which to learn them that makes the most sense, both scientifically and academically.

A Chinese character Universe to learn

You’ll learn to view Chinese characters as a group of families with their parents, children, cousins, and so on. They all come from one big tree with a few roots, and that’s what this world wants you to see. We’ll take you back to the Big Bang of how Chinese Characters were formed because becoming familiar with the roots and the primitive aspects of Chinese characters help greatly with learning a new character more easily.  

In this new world, each stage is dedicated to a limited set of words, and choose to focus on the characters you’d need to learn to be at ease with those words, as well as the character components you want to be familiar with.

In each stage, learn words and the characters that are key to know and the components that’ll shed light on how the characters are built!

To say it more specifically, In this world, we optimize the learning process of Chinese characters by ordering Chinese Characters using a novel topological sorting algorithm. Thanks to the new algorithm, you’ll see the benefits of learning Chinese Characters in order of usage frequency and in order of their hierarchal structural relationships. For example, you’ll learn the semantic-phonetic compounds of a Chinese character before learning the characters. It means that you’ll deploy fewer efforts to learn new words thanks to a special learning order.

Using this approach teaches you what to look for in a Chinese Character and where to look, and that’ll allow you to recognize/guess the meaning or its pronunciation instantly or nearly so. In other words, in this new world on Ninchanese, you will learn the real meaning of characters by learning first their ancestors, that is to say, from where they come from and how they are built. Here’s an example of a character tree:

Primitive characters appear as characters in their own right, whereas primitive components do not. The primitive component 灬 is an abbreviated form of the primitive character 火. The parameter r is the SUBTLEX-CH usage frequency rank of the character. Pronunciations are given in pinyin romanization. Note that each character is only assigned a single meaning. That is even though most actually possess a range of broadly related meanings.

More bang for your buck, what’s not to like in the idea?

The study compares the new algorithm to other well-known character learning methods, such as Heisig’s. It found that it outperforms previously published orders and algorithms.

How? The idea behind this new algorithm is also to introduce useful words you’ll be able to use productively right away. You won’t just be learning components. Characters and their components are only introduced when they compose multiple-character words or when the character forms a single-character word itself.

In short, it’s all about learning Chinese characters and words in a special order. This order takes into account:

• character frequencies,
• word frequencies,
• phonetic components,
• semantic components (aka meaning components),
• primitive components,
• the number of strokes,
• the relationship between them,
• and more.

This has a number of benefits. It’ll tremendously develop your character recognition and acquisition. What’s more, it will also help you distinguish similar sounds and characters and also characters that share the same sound.

Learn characters and words you’ll be able to use right away

This approach to learning to read and write Chinese has another clear advantage. The words you learn can be put to immediate and productive use when reading and writing sentences. These activities help the learning process. That’s why you’ll be learning Chinese characters in an optimal learning order.

Even if you are mainly focused on learning immediately useful words, you will find this new world useful. You’ll be able to recognize words more easily after learning the characters and words in the Universe World. That, in turn, will help you learn sentences and grammar more easily.

Note: Sometimes, you’ll be learning characters that are rarely used on their own. That’ll be because these characters are often found in words of 2 or more characters. These, however, are very frequently encountered. It’s a great way to understand a word deeper and learn it faster. Just keep in mind that by learning these characters, you’ll be adding them to our collection of learned words on Ninchanese and in your SRS. So, if you don’t want to learn components or single characters you won’t find yourself using as is, we recommend doing the classic story worlds of Ninchanese first.

So, what do you think? Ready to experience a new way of learning Chinese characters that’s both easy and fast for you? All thanks to the help of an algorithm that devised a clever order in which you should learn them?  We sure hope you have a blast learning Chinese characters this way! Be sure to let us know your thoughts!

We wish you success in your Chinese learning!

The Nincha Team

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The post New world: The Chinese Character Universe – Science-based Chinese character learning appeared first on Ninchanese.

First, a question for you: what starts with playing and ends with laughing in Mandarin?

No clue? Ok, so do you know how to say to joke in Chinese? That’s the answer!  The Chinese use 玩笑 to say “to joke”!

How to say to joke in Chinese: 玩笑

玩笑

wán

to

玩笑 means to joke and usually, you’ll use it with the verb 开 like 我开玩笑. If you want to say “I’m just kidding“, the expression also uses 玩笑: 只是开玩笑   – zhǐ shì kāi wán xiào – Just kidding! 

玩笑 breakdown

Breaking down 玩笑 shows you it’s an adorable term. To see that, you just need to understand the meaning of the individual characters that compose it.

Let’s see: 玩笑 is composed of the character 玩

玩

wán

to

The word 玩笑 also contains the character 笑

笑

xiào

to

Now you understand better why we asked you, in the beginning, to guess what starts with playing and ends with laughing, right?

In Chinese, playing to make people laugh is how you “joke”. Isn’t that a very accurate way of describing joking?

Can you think of a better description of how to say to joke in Chinese?

That’s all for today folks! See you next week for the next Play with Chinese words! In the meantime, have fun playing jokes with your friends!

Don’t hesitate to comment with your best jokes in the comments!

The Nincha Team

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The answer is the Chinese word 冲浪:

冲浪

chōng

to

 It’s  funny because the Chinese manage to give you a very clear idea of what surfing is about, just by associating words. Of course, it helps that these words literally show you what is going on when you surf. Think about it for a second: if you were to describe the action of surfing to someone who has no clue what it is, AND were only allowed to use two words, which would you pick?

Think about it for a second: if you were to describe the action of surfing to someone who has no clue what it is, AND were only allowed to use two words, which would you pick? Would you pick the ones the Chinese used to create the word 冲浪, to surf in Mandarin?

 冲浪 breakdown

Let’s breakdown 冲浪 to understand the meaning of the invidual characters that compose it.

First, 冲浪 is composed of the character 冲

冲

chōng

to

Notice how the character 冲 contains  冫, a very useful semantic component to know, as well as the phonetic component 中?

The word 冲浪 also contains the character 浪

浪

làng

wave

So in Chinese, surfing = colliding with waves! Can’t say we disagree with that way of putting it

That’s all for today folks! See you next week for the next Play with Chinese words! In the meantime, have fun colliding with the waves!

In the meantime, we hope you have fun colliding with the waves!

The Nincha Team

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It’s quite normal when you’re starting out in Mandarin to wonder how many characters and words are there exactly in Chinese? And then, to wonder immediately after that, just how many of those Chinese characters do I need to learn? The task may seem daunting, the number of Chinese characters that exist is enormous, but after you read this post, I can assure you that you’ll know exactly how many and how to find Chinese characters to learn. We’ll see first what the Chinese language is made of, then, how many Chinese characters you need to know and finally the amount of characters natives know.

How many characters exist in total in Chinese?

What is the Chinese language made of? Nowadays, the Chinese language is made of more than 80,000 characters, 85,568 characters to be more precise according to the Zhonghua Zihai dictionary. The 中华字海 Zhonghua Zihai dictionary contains all the Chinese characters that have ever existed, from old Buddhist texts to characters used by the Qing, Ming and Song dynasties. Such a very complete dictionary! It sounds very impressive, but you should know that a lot of the characters contained in this dictionary are actually no longer used.

So now you know that there are at least 80 000 characters in Mandarin. But it doesn’t stop there! These 80 000 characters equal many, many, more Chinese words. How does that work?
In the Chinese language, 字 zì characters also known as 汉字 hànzi (hanzi) meaning Chinese characters can be combined together to create 词 cí words. Yes, you heard right.
Single characters can be words on their own, for instance, you can use the character 手 shǒu hand if you want to talk about someone’s hand but most words in Chinese are composed of two or more characters. So if you take this character 手 for example, you can combine it with other characters to create new words like 手表 Shǒubiǎo wristwatch.

The Chinese language works in an interesting way, doesn’t it? It’s a little tricky.

This means if you “only” learned the 80,000 Chinese characters, you’d be able to understand a good number of the words you run across in a text, but not all of them. It’s often possible to guess the meaning of two characters combined together to form a new word, but often, it’s not possible, as you’ll see below.
Let’s take the characters 手 and 机 and their pinyin.

手 shǒu hand

+

机 jī machine

= 手机 shǒujī cellphone

You can easily guess the meaning of the word 手机 in simplified Chinese when you know the meaning of each individual character.

On the contrary, here’s a tougher word to crack, using the characters 上 and 手:

上 shàng above

+

手 shǒu hand

= 上手 shàngshǒu to master

See? The Chinese word 上手 made of the two characters 上 and 手 is harder to guess! And if you don’t know the characters you’ll hardly guess the word’s pronunciation.

Ninchanese is an incredible app for learning Chinese!

” I actually graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a MA in Chinese.
I’ve used Ninchanese daily, and it has helped me a lot!  “

 – Connor, Ninchanese User

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This is why you should master both Chinese characters and terms, to be able to understand the texts you run into in China.

So how many Chinese words are there in Chinese? That’s an even tougher question than how many Chinese characters are there. As Chinese is a living language, it’s hard to give a definite count. The Chinese language is still evolving and new terms and expressions are created every day. To give you an idea, The 汉语大词典 Hanyu Da Cidian (lit: Comprehensive Chinese Word Dictionary) is said to contain 370,000 words. Just like the 中华字海 Zhonghua Zihai dictionary for characters, a lot of the entries in the 汉语大词典 are no longer in use.

You know now how to identify Chinese characters (one syllable max) and words (one or more 字). But are you worried by the sheer quantity of words that exist in Chinese? We have some good news for you: there is no need to memorize all 80,000+ Chinese characters or 370 000 Chinese words. All you have to do is master the characters and terms which are commonly used today in the Chinese language. Conversational fluency in Chinese is within your reach and won’t take years and years of study. Relieved? I’m sure what you’re really itching to know now is: So, how many Chinese characters will I need to learn to be able to handle most texts in everyday circumstances?

How many Chinese characters do you really need to learn?

Many people are afraid of learning Chinese because of the 80,000 characters that make up the Chinese language. It seems like a lot to learn. The truth is you don’t need to know that many characters to speak Chinese. Did you really believe that Chinese natives all know 80,000 characters? Nope! Not at all. Native Chinese speakers themselves don’t know that many words and characters in Chinese! That’d be an incredible amount of terms to know. So before we move on to how many Chinese words and Chinese characters you would be required know to be considered fluent, let’s see first how many characters an average Chinese speaker knows.

In elementary school, Chinese pupils are expected to learn about 2,500 characters which are the most used. Then they assimilate about 1,000 more specific ones during middle school and high school. In the end, Chinese students that have finished high school know about 4,500 characters. For reference, the Chinese government puts literacy at 2000 characters. Well-educated Chinese people know anywhere from 8,000 characters and upwards. That’s really far away from the 80,000 Chinese characters! Only specialized linguists and scholars get closer to those 80,000.

4500 to 8000 characters to know doesn’t sound too bad, right? So how many Chinese characters do YOU need to know to be considered fluent? The number of Chinese characters and words you need to know depends on many things such as your learning goal, your current fluency level or even the frequency of use of these characters.

What’s your learning goal for Chinese?

First, ask yourself what’s your goal in speaking Chinese? What are you looking to do? If you want to live in China, and simply interact in your everyday life in Chinese, a working vocabulary of 1000 words might be enough to start with. You don’t need to learn many characters to travel to China. If you need to order food, read something that’s written on a menu, call a taxi or even asking for a direction, few survival words would be enough. If you want to understand what’s going on TV, on the radio or in the newspapers, you’ll basically need to learn about 3,000 to 4,000 characters. In newspapers you’ll find about 2.500 very common Chinese characters, so knowing 3,000 characters will allow you to understand about 99% of what’s written.

Now if your goal is to be able to read a Chinese dictionary, which is a pretty advanced Chinese goal, then you’ll need to know at least 9,000 to 15,000 characters to be able to comfortably read the definitions.
Having a Chinese learning goal is essential to progress, but knowing what level you are is also very important to know what Chinese characters and terms to learn.

What’s your level?

You’ve just started learning Chinese? Then you belong to the HSK 1 level which requires learning about 150 words. You’ve just entered the world 3 in Ninchanese? Then you’re the HSK 3 level and you’ll need to learn about 300 new terms. Check your level and see how many words you have to learn according to the HSK. As there has been a renewal of the HSK exams.

The numbers of words you need to learn for the new HSK:

HSK 1: 153    –     HSK 2: 150    –     HSK 3: 300    –     HSK 4: 598    –     HSK 5: 1300    –     HSK 6: 2513

The HSK levels are important if you want to prove your Chinese skills by taking the exam, it’s also good for you to know where you are and where you’re heading to. But don’t rely on them, as some terms in the lists are sometimes quite odd, and not that useful on a daily basis.

Pick the right characters to learn: Mind the characters’ frequency

Learning every single Chinese character would be a waste of time as you’ll rarely meet some of them. Why don’t you learn the characters that are the most used in everyday life? Here’s the list of the most frequent characters. See? Currently, the most used Chinese character is 的 de of; particle. If you master the most frequent Chinese characters, you’ll be in theory able to read a newspaper, have a conversation, watch TV and so on. It just depends on how many frequent characters you decide to learn. If you digest 100 of the most common characters, you statistically should have a 42% understanding of the characters you run into.

1000 of the most frequent Chinese characters should bring you an 89% understanding of what you read.The caveat to this method is that the 11%, for instance, you won’t understand will be the characters that bring you the meaning of the sentence. Imagine being able to read everything single word in a sentence that says “I bought an XXX for cheap”. If you don’t know what XXX means, then the sentence is rather pointless isn’t? The best way to counter that is to keep expanding your Chinese vocabulary, by learning new characters, and more specific terms you’re interested in, and more specific until you’ve learned the 3000 to 4000 most frequent Chinese characters. Then, you should be familiar with the vast majority of the characters you running into.

My advice : Do a little bit of everything

Pay attention to these three steps to know what and how many characters you should learn. My best advice would be to put as a goal: master 2,500 to 3,000 characters. Therefore, you’ll be able to understand many things. When you’re HSK 4 level (world 4 in Ninchanese), you should be able to understand about 2,000 characters and terms. But how and what should you learn? In Ninchanese, we help you learn the most common and frequently used Chinese characters. So, take the road to world 4 and you’ll be on the right path to speaking Chinese like a native!

Final words:

Now that you know how many terms and characters exist in Chinese, and how many characters you need to learn, aren’t you glad you asked? You see, there’s no need to be scared of some mischievous Chinese characters! You don’t need to assimilate an entire Chinese dictionary by heart to be fluent in Chinese, just follow our advice, and you’ll soon be learning the Chinese words and characters you need to reach your goal of fluency in Chinese!

Learning words and characters is the key to reading anything you see and fitting in China! The cool thing about Chinese characters is that they are the writing system common to all forms of spoken Chinese. See, you could be learning one of the many dialects of the Chinese language (check out this page to learn more about them), you’ll still be using Chinese characters.
Let’s say, for instance, that you want to learn Cantonese, as Olly Richards did in one year, can you guess what writing system you’ll be using? That’s right, Chinese characters. No matter what spoken form of Chinese you’re learning, you’ll be using them in writing.  So it’s pretty important to learn Chinese characters and really, there’s no need to be afraid of learning them.

Just pick your main learning goal, be realistic in the number of terms and Chinese characters you want to learn based on your actual level and select the characters that are the most frequent if you want to save time and efficiently study Mandarin. We’ve already selected the words you should know in Ninchanese so learn Chinese at your own speed without thinking about what you need to learn. After all, most of the Chinese only know about 5,000 characters and we know you soon will too!

Now tell us, how many words do you think you know in simplified Chinese? Or have you stopped counting?

The Nincha Team

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Your emotions in Chinese

Meoow tip Click on the picture to open it full size in a new tab/window. And feel free to print it It makes a nice poster.

Learn to talk about your feelings and the emotions of those that are around you.

The Nincha Team

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The post Emotions in Chinese: Express your feelings! appeared first on Ninchanese.