English for Chinese

Chinese has been widely considered to be one of the most difficult languages in the world. What constitutes the difficulty of a language? C...

[The following was written on November 11, 2016.] The author of the famous military strategy book The Art of War , Sun Wu , commonly kno...

A Chinese reader asked me about the difference between "freedom" and "liberty" when translating Chinese "自由" i...

In my last post , I said "Most languages in the world take the alphabetic writing system. Studying the internal history of its vocabul...

People speaking English as the native language are used to dictionaries in which each headword contains not only the definition of the word...

The dictionary translation of "technical" is "技术的", as in "technical skill", "technical innovations...

On May 20th, Obama signed a bill that removes "Negro," "Oriental" and a few other terms from federal laws, specifical...

An auxiliary verb is one that cannot be used alone and must work with a regular verb. English "can" is an example, e.g. "I ca...

In English, a restrictive clause restricts the scope of the noun or pronoun in front of it (antecedent, head word), while a non-restrictive...

Four and half years ago, I checked language popularity based on the number of shelves for the foreign language books at a local Borders Boo...