Introduction of Pinyin

From today on, we are going to have a quite long journey of Pinyin. It will help you build a strong foundation to continue learning Chinese

 

What is China?

What is China? That's really a very big question, even for me, who has lived there for 36 years.  Fortunately, I found this link.The way they answer this big question is fairly interesting. Anyway, it's a good way to get a general idea about China in a short moment.
http://www.chinese4kids.net/what-is-china/

How to write Merry Christmas in Chinese

I made this video to show you writing Christmas greetings in Chinese.  This video also covers some information about the simplified Chinese character and traditional Chinese character. They are two set of character systems which are still wildly used today. Traditional characters have been used for about more than 3000 years. They looked more complicated but they keep the original ideas of how they were made pretty well. So many people think the traditional characters are better than the simplified, because they are more meaningful. The simplified character system was introduced and prompted by the Chinese government during 1950s, to improve the literacy rates in population. It is much easier for everyone to learn to read and write simplified characters than the traditional ones. And the shortcoming about the simplified Chinese characters is that they do lost part of the beauty and meanings.
People live in the China mainland use the simplified Chinese, while those live in Taiwan, HongKong, and Macao still use the traditional ones. And the traditional Chinese characters are more preferred when people practice calligraphy.