To a non-Chinese speaker (like me), and especially to a Westerner (like me), Chinese is the most impenetrable family of languages on Earth. While there may be only an eighth as many syllables as in ...

Mike Hainzinger was living in Taiwan in the early 2000s and faced a choice: try to get by with a minuscule bit of Mandarin Chinese that he knew, “pointing at things and smiling,” or make an effort to ...

Mandarin Chinese is spoken by over a billion people across Asia and around the globe, making it a useful language for travelers to know. Learning pinyin, which romanizes Chinese characters, can ...