Articles
Deep dives, comparisons, and reference guides. The documentation you wish every language had.
Thematic Explorations
Topic-first walks through radical families and the everyday vocabulary they unlock.
Food & Eating — a radical tour
Chinese food vocabulary clusters around 8 radicals. Learn 饣, 口, 米, 艹, 鸟, 月, 火, 水 once and ~40 words fall out for free.
The Body — 月/手/足/目/口/耳/心
Anatomy vocabulary is held together by seven radicals. Learn where 月 stops meaning "moon" and starts meaning "flesh", and the body parts fall out as a single type hierarchy.
The Home — 宀/门/户/广
Four shelter radicals generate the vocabulary of houses, rooms, and domestic life. A structural tour of where you live.
Travel & Transport — 车/辶/舟/飞
Anything that moves is tagged with one of four radicals. Vehicles, verbs of motion, and the grammar of "going somewhere" all fall out of this small set.
Time & Dates — 日/月/年/时
How Chinese builds its time system from four primitives. Why 星期 is a "star cycle", why months are numbered, and the pattern that makes every date self-describing.
Weather & Sky — 雨/日/风/云
The 雨 radical is a weather factory: 雪, 雷, 雾, 霜 all inherit from it. A tour of the atmospheric type family.
Animals — 鸟/鱼/马/犬/虫/羊/牛
Seven animal radicals and the creatures that inherit from them. Why 猫 has a 犬 inside, and how the pictographs actually look like the animals they name.
Plants & Nature — 艹/木/禾/竹
Four plant radicals — grasses, trees, grain, bamboo — that classify every living green thing in the language.
Emotions — the 心 radical family
Feelings, thoughts, and mental states all live under one radical: 心 (heart). Whether it appears as 忄 on the side or 心 underneath, it marks everything the mind does.
Clothing & Fabric — 衤/纟/巾
Three textile radicals cover every piece of cloth in Chinese: garments (衤), threads (纟), and cloths (巾). The wardrobe as a type system.
Medicine & Health — 疒/月/艹
The sickness radical 疒 marks every illness; 药 (medicine) lives under 艹 because drugs come from plants. The anatomy of the Chinese medical vocabulary.
Water & Liquids — the 氵 family beyond food
The water radical shows up in 海, 河, 湖, 洗, 汗, 泪, 酒 and dozens more. A full tour of what 氵 tags beyond the drinks you already know.
Fire & Heat — 火/灬
火 at the side means fire; the same radical squashed into 灬 at the bottom means the same thing in 热, 煮, 烤. The thermodynamic radical, in two forms.
Money & Value — the 贝 radical
Before coins, China used cowrie shells as currency. That is why every word about value — 购, 贵, 贱, 贷, 账, 财 — still carries the shell radical 贝.
Numbers & Counting — 一/十/百/千/万
Chinese numbers are a positional system with unit markers. Once you learn 十, 百, 千, 万, every number up to 99,999 is just composition.
Tools & Metal — 钅/石/玉/工
Hardware has its own radical. 钅(metal), 石 (stone), 玉 (jade), and 工 (work/tool) tag the vocabulary of engineering, crafts, and industry.
Phrasebook
Social situations as API docs — patterns, templates, and sample dialogs for real conversations.
Greetings & Introductions — greet() / introduce()
The opening handshake of any Chinese conversation. Patterns for 你好, 早上好, 我叫..., 认识你很高兴, and the edge cases for formal vs casual.
Personal Info — age, origin, languages
The three questions everyone will ask you in the first five minutes: where are you from, how old are you, what languages do you speak. Pattern library for the answers.
Family & Relationships — kinship as a tree
Chinese kinship terms encode the entire family graph: mother's-side vs father's-side, older vs younger, male vs female. The tree has ~30 nodes. Here they are.
Daily Routines — morning / work / evening
The verbs you do every day, with the aspect particles that mark them as habitual vs in-progress vs completed. Daily life as a state machine.
Telling Time & Scheduling
Clock time, dates, appointments, durations. The Chinese time expression is strictly ordered: year → month → day → hour. Position is meaning.
Directions & Buying Tickets
Asking how to get somewhere, buying a ticket, understanding route descriptions. The verbs of motion plus the sentence shapes that carry them.
Shopping & Bargaining
Prices, measure words for goods, 太贵了, 便宜一点 — the patterns of retail conversation, including the ones you need at an open-air market.
Dining Out — ordering, paying, 点菜/买单
The restaurant protocol: getting a table, reading the menu, placing an order, asking for the check. Companion to the Food & Eating radical tour.
Weather Smalltalk
The one smalltalk topic that always works. Patterns for describing, predicting, and complaining about the weather — including the aspect particles that make it sound native.
Hobbies & Interests
How to say what you like, what you are good at, and what you want to try. The 喜欢/爱/会/能 verb cluster in its natural habitat.
At the Doctor — symptoms → prescription
Describing pain, answering intake questions, understanding prescriptions. A branching conversation modelled as an if/else tree.
Travel Booking — hotels & flights
Reserving rooms, checking in, changing flights. The conditional patterns that come up whenever plans have to fork.
Emergencies — 报警 / 救护车 / basic first aid
The phrases you hope you never need. Calling 110 / 120, describing what happened, giving your location. A small vocabulary that could matter a lot.
Festivals & Culture — 春节/中秋 as recurring events
The major Chinese holidays, what people do on each, and the greeting patterns that come with them. Cultural context is half the language.
WeChat, Weibo & Social Media
The vocabulary of the Chinese internet: 加好友, 朋友圈, 点赞, 转发, 红包. How people actually communicate online.
Work & Office — emails, meetings, 加班
Professional Chinese: introducing yourself at a meeting, writing an email, the vocabulary of 项目, 汇报, 加班. The patterns you need to work with a Chinese team.
School & Exams
Subjects, grades, homework, exams. The vocabulary of student life, plus the patterns for talking about what you study and how it is going.
Money, Banking & Payments — 支付/汇率
Opening an account, using Alipay and WeChat Pay, asking about exchange rates. The financial vocabulary of modern China, which is mostly mobile.
Grammar Reference
Deep dives on specific grammar points, vocabulary comparisons, and cheat sheets.
The Measure Word Cheat Sheet
The 20 most common classifiers, when to use them, and when 个 is acceptable. Type annotations for everyday Chinese.
Aspect Particles Decision Flowchart
A programmer's flowchart for choosing between 了, 过, and 着. State management for your Chinese sentences.
Compare 者 vs 人 vs 家 vs 师
Four suffixes that turn verbs/nouns into "person who does X" — but they are not interchangeable. A deep dive into the type hierarchy of Chinese person-nouns.
Top 50 Most Useful 者 Words
A curated reference of the 50 most practical 者 compounds — from 记者 (journalist) to 消费者 (consumer). Organized by frequency and domain.
的 / 地 / 得 — Three Accessor Operators
Three particles, one pinyin (de), three totally different jobs. 的 attaches to nouns, 地 to verbs, 得 to complements. The punctuation of Chinese grammar.
The 把 Construction — method calls in Chinese
When you want to foreground what happens TO the object, you front it with 把. A structural tour of the construction, its rules, and its code-shaped mental model.
要/会/能/可以 — Modal Verbs Compared
Four verbs that all translate to English "can" or "will" — but each one encodes a different kind of possibility. The complete decision table.
Question Particles as Decorators — 吗/呢/吧
Three one-character suffixes that turn any statement into a question, a follow-up, or a suggestion. Mandarin's @decorator syntax.
如果/虽然/即使 — Conditional & Concessive Patterns
Chinese uses paired connectors: 如果...就, 虽然...但是, 即使...也. If/then as an actual visible template. A reference of all the pairs that matter.
Resultative & Directional Complements — return types
完, 懂, 好, 到, 上, 下, 出, 进 attach to verbs the way return types attach to functions. They tell you what happened, not just what was done.
Tone Sandhi Rules — 三声 + 不 + 一
The written tones aren't always the tones you speak. The third-tone rule, 不 → bú before 4th tone, and 一 shifting by context. The runtime tone transformations.