The Listen & Learn team is incredibly diverse and heavily multicultural. But there is one thing we all have in common: We love languages. Since you’re visiting our blog, it’s very likely you love languages too! However, this doesn’t mean languages can’t scare us from time to time. Scary languages might haunt us with impossibly complex grammatical rules,(…)

In today’s economy, it’s difficult to get any kind of edge in the job market. It seems like the only way to get some experience is to get a job, and the only way to get a job is to have a tonne of experience. While trapped in your grandma’s basement, waiting for your ship(…)

They say you can learn a lot about a person from their handwriting. Graphologists suggest that they can interpret emotions, mindsets and even environments, just from studying someone’s scrawl. So what about writers of Chinese? Is the same true for them? We’re more about the language and less about the writing if we are being(…)

Since us native English speakers have decided that English is the most important language in the world, you would think we would be a little kinder to those choosing to learn our language. When instead, we titter, mock, and joyfully repeat every single mistake learners make for the amusement of ourselves and other natives—or take(…)

Based on anecdotal evidence from popular media, it’s widely believed that alcohol improves the ability to speak in a foreign language, ostensibly due to the anxiety-reducing effects of booze itself. Based on personal experience, a couple of drinks goes a long way toward loosening my tongue no matter what language I’m speaking. I’m currently on(…)

Depending on your perspective, Taipei’s night markets are either popular tourist destinations or mundane features of everyday life. The stereotypical Taipei night market (yèshì 夜市) is a combination of North American farmer’s market, flea market, and low-budget amusement arcade, while sharing similarities with a souk (Arabian Peninsula), bazaar (Middle East), mercado (Spain), tianguis (Mexico), and/or palengke(…)

You may have already heard that Chinese is taking over the world! With over a billion people speaking Chinese all around the globe, this is an incredibly widespread tongue. When even Mark Zuckerberg decides to try his hand at learning Chinese, you know there must be something to it. After all, Chinese is quickly becoming(…)

To complete our introduction to Chinese, our final article about this fascinating language is concerning Chinese dialects. Mandarin is spoken by around 955 million people the world over. That is an astonishing amount of people all speaking the same tongue. Compare that to English, which is often thought to be the most spoken language in(…)

你好! 你好吗? (Nǐ hǎo! Nǐ hǎo ma? Or if you prefer pinyin, the Romanisation of standard Chinese, or Mandarin). We are of course saying hello, how are you? With the rapid growth of the Chinese economy and an ever increasing amount of Chinese investment overseas, is it any wonder that the number of schools in(…)

Since hosting the 2008 Summer Olympics, Beijing has soared to a top destination for pleasure travel. Additionally, in the last decade the Chinese capital has become an important city for international business due to the growing Chinese economy and its political power. Beijing is a massive city with more than 12 million inhabitants and a(…)