Blog for Dong Chinese, an app to help you learn to understand Chinese through thousands of real example sentences, captioned images, videos, podcasts, and songs.
Posts
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Learning Chinese with Nihao Cafe
Recently a language school called That’s Mandarin reached out to me. They have many free resources to help you learn Chinese, such as their 1-minute Chinese videos with useful tidbits. Their videos are already available on the Dong Chinese Media section: https://www.dong-chinese.com/media/That’s%20Mandarin
They also let me try out their learning platform called NihaoCafe. I really enjoyed my experience with their teachers using their platform, and I’d like to share some details about it with everyone. -
Chinese Character Wiki
The data powering the dictionary on Dong Chinese is now available to the public on the Chinese Character Wiki. The wiki contains breakdowns and explanations of the origins of the 1000 most common characters in Chinese books and movies. If you ever see any errors or things that can be improved on the Dong Chinese dictionary, you can suggest edits on the wiki. All of the data is free to download.
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Review of GoEast Mandarin
GoEast Mandarin is a language school with highly qualified, professional, and enthusiastic teachers who are all native speakers. All of their lessons are entirely in Chinese, so you won’t waste any lesson time speaking English. -
New features: discussions and study lists
We’ve rolled out two new features recently, study lists and discussions.
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The official new HSK word lists are out
The HSK (Chinese proficiency test) has been updated recently. You can browse the new lists on the Dong Chinese dictionary. The page for videos divided by HSK level has also been updated to reflect the new HSK levels.
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Introducing dark mode
We’ve rolled out a long-requested feature: dark mode. This can help your eyes relax and save battery on your phone.
You can activate dark mode by going to Settings -> Miscellaneous -> Dark mode.
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New feature: Leaderboard
There is now a new leaderboard page where you can see the most active users on Dong Chinese. Can you reach the top?
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Custom fonts
On the settings page you can now choose which font style you want to use.
This can help you get accustomed to the different font variations you might see, and to expose yourself to cursive Chinese with handwriting shortcuts. -
New feature: gift subscriptions
- What are gift subscriptions?
Gift subscriptions are a way for you to give the gift of learning Chinese with Dong Chinese. Gift subscriptions are available for different time plans. Gift purchasers can choose their own plan. Give a gift subscription now.
- What are gift subscriptions?
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Tone trainer: a simple tool to practice hearing the difference between tones
Check out the new tone trainer feature!
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Interview on the You Can Learn Chinese podcast
I was interviewed on the You Can Learn Chinese podcast.
Episode #40: How to set Goals for Learning Chinese(the portion with my interview starts at 29:40)
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The three most gruesome Chinese characters
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Referral codes
A referral code is a unique code assigned to your account. You can use this code to refer your friends to Dong Chinese and get rewarded. When you refer a friend to Dong Chinese, both of you will get a 20% discount on all of your future payments.
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New feature: examples tab in Dong Chinese dictionary
Recently I added a new feature to the Dong Chinese dictionary that shows examples sentences, media, and images for any word that you look up.
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Dong Chinese public roadmap
Being accountable to and open with all our users is very important to us. To achieve that in the most transparent way, we have created a central spot to keep track of our journey. -
懂中文的故事
开发懂中文已经有不短的时间了，我想给大家介绍一下懂中文的背后故事。 -
The story behind Dong Chinese
Dong Chinese has been under development for a while now, so I thought I would tell the story behind how and why I started building it. -
Synchronizing Chinese audio with a transcript
Recently I added a feature to Dong Chinese media that shows the current sentence and word being spoken:
I had thought about doing this before, but I quickly dismissed the idea because I thought it would take a lot of manual work to watch every video and align the text and audio myself.
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New feature: add your own media on Dong Chinese
On the Dong Chinese media page, you can find lots of videos to watch and audio to listen to in Chinese. Now you can add your own videos and audio to study. -
The twisted story of 來来 (come) and 麥麦 (wheat)
The characters 來 (lái; come) and 麥 (mài; wheat) have a rather unusual story behind them.
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Searching for high-quality Chinese-English sentence pairs
The main philosophy of Dong Chinese is that language should be learned through context, rather than memorizing individual words in isolation. This requires a large collection of complete sentences. -
Interesting verbiage on signs in China
温馨提示：向前一小步 文明一大步
wēnxīn tíshì: xiàng qián yī xiǎo bù wénmíng yī dà bù
Gentle reminder: one small step forward, one big step for civilization
(don’t make a mess on the urinal with your bad aim)
This sign is humorously reminiscient of Niel Armstrong’s famous words when he first stepped onto the surface of the moon in 1969, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” The literal meaning of this sign is almost identical to what Armstrong said, but used here in a rather indelicate context. -
Stop learning Chinese with flashcards
Spaced-repetition flashcards are useful. I can’t deny that, but at the same time I can’t recommend relying on them too much for learning Chinese.
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Origins of the 1000 most common Chinese characters
I started working on this project about 3 years ago, writing explanations of the origins of the most commonly used Characters in Chinese. This is one of the most ambitious projects that I have ever started, and I’m proud to say that I recently reached my goal of creating explanations for the following:
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10 things I learned about ancient China from studying Chinese characters
Chinese characters have been around for thousands of years, and many of them have created traces that we can follow to discover some interesting fragments of Chinese history.
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What does "Dong" mean?
Most people ask the same question when I first show them Dong Chinese. There are two answers to that question. One is simple (but boring), and the other is complicated (but interesting!)
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