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Other advice posts that may be of interest:

How To Stop Procrastinating

How To Study When You Really Don’t Want To

it's way more fun to learn by reading an actual story than just studying individual words with flashcards or something like that

imo it's easier to remember a word if you've read it in the context of a sentence / story, than if you've learned it by going through a vocabulary list

there is a sense of accomplishment when you've finished reading a graded reader - yes, they're easy stories specifically written for learners of a certain level but still - having read an entire story / book in Chinese just feels great, you know (especially if you're at a level where you can't read actual novels yet)

there are different levels based on how many characters you already know - so you can easily choose the right level for you, and once the stories of that level become (too) easy to read, or you've read all of the stories from that level, you can move on to the next one

new words are underlined and translated in footnotes (+ there's a list of all the new words at the end of the book)

new words get repeated throughout the story (not ALL the new / translated words get repeated, some are just necessary for that one part of the story, but some other words get repeated A LOT - which is great for memorizing them)

sometimes you get several similar looking characters in one sentence (like 买 and 卖) - which of course will happen in actual novels too, but I'm pretty sure it's done on purpose here, to help you learn to discern them; you'll also get characters with a similar pronunciation next to each other (e.g. 找照片)

one character with several meanings sometimes gets introduced with two different meanings (like 烟 meaning 'smoke' in one sentence and 'cigarette' in another one)

there are audio book versions available for all the stories (you need to buy them separately though)

you can either just use the book to practice reading the characters, use the book and the audio version together to learn how the characters are pronounced, or use only the audio book to practice your listening comprehension (or all of those things)

you learn new words and see how they are used in context + see different sentence structures

there are no grammar explanations, but at the end of the book there's a list of the grammar points used throughout the story, so you can look those up

[*I've only used graded readers by Mandarin Companion so far, so this is specifically about those. They currently have three levels: breakthrough (150 unique characters) , level 1 (300 characters) and level 2 (450 characters). Oh, and they're available both in traditional and simplified characters]

(I've joked that I sing DuChinese's praises so often that they should pay me, lmao)

从 cóng - from, based on

尸僵 shī jiāng - literally "corpse stiffness" rigor mortis

程度 chéngdù - degree or extent

来看 lái kàn - literally "come to see"; in this context "it can be seen that"/ "the conclusion can be drawn that"

Translation: From the degree of rigor mortis, you can tell that..."

The hilarious thing is that google translate (which is not the best machine translation) had zero trouble with this. IDK what machine translation the subtitles used, but it's significantly worse than google translate.

with the fullness of time, i can admit i was wrong. "do the monk thing to my head" would be more like "頭を坊主した" or "頭を坊主ことした"

Like the word bitter. It’s a basic flavor category, it’s your tongue detecting alkaline foods. We have specific cells to detect it. It’s no surprise that many languages would have a word for that.

But there’s no reason a language has to also use that word metaphorically, to describe an emotional state that is unpleasant in a way that maybe vaguely resembles the way bitter foods can be unpleasant, or things that cause that emotion (a bitter defeat). It’s not shocking that multiple languages do, obviously - it makes sense to use something unpleasant as a metaphor for something else unpleasant - but it would be very easy for a language not to. Heck, maybe some languages use a smell word like pungent or acrid to describe that emotion!

And yet in Mandarin, 苦 (kǔ) means bitter as in flavor - and there it is again, being used metaphorically to mean pain, hardship, and suffering, or to be enduring those things (and can also be used for causing those things, just like in English!).

i'm gonna break this up into 2 pieces: the concept of grammatical gender, and the "why," such as it is.

words don't have social gender the same way we apply it to humans! grammatical gender is a noun class system that has implications for grammatical agreement in other words. some languages end up with correlations to human social gender, yes, but structurally they don't have to be linked.

this is one of those questions that doesn't really have an answer. there's not necessarily a cohesive "why" to the way linguistic structures develop, and it's virtually impossible to design the question in such a way that it could be empirically investigated. i might be able to ask "why does a scribe in X place at Y time use Z inflection in this text" and come up with a reasonable explanation involving sociolinguistic factors, but it's much much harder to research something so broad and ultimately ambiguous.

Polygloss has you describe an image in your target language so another player can guess it. It encourages creative answers. The game works for people of all levels — you can describe simple pictures or try your hand at wordplay.