English for Chinese

The Chinese empty word (虚词) "虽然" or "尽管" corresponds to "although", "though", or one sense of "...

The Chinese empty word (虚词) "当然" is generally translated as "of course" or "certainly". It makes perfect sense...

The Chinese empty word (虚词) "很" means "very". This translation is straightforward and universally accepted. But there...

The term "empty word", or "虚词", in Chinese, refers to "a word or morpheme that has no lexical meaning and that func...

I read this on weibo.com, the Chinese equivalent of Facebook: "We used to learn English to know the world. We now learn English to know...

In October 5, 2011, I posted Why the Chinese language should not adopt phonetic writing? , where I brought up Sun Yat-sen's statement th...

Teaching English, Chinese, or any language as a second language must obey the rule that the students learn the fastest when they understand...

I keep hearing non-native Chinese speakers greet a native Chinese with a friendly "Ni Hao Ma?" (你好吗?). It's time to set this s...

My kids were reading the English version of the program for an end-of-year show in the Chinese community. They had doubt about the last one ...

This is part of a comment posted to Xujun Eberline's blog Will Chinese Go Alphabetic? Re-posted here as a standalone piece. "Phon...