Mandarin Learning Tips Blog

Welcome to our second course of the most common verbs in Chinese. If you are new here and want to have a look at the first course about essential verbs in Mandarin, click here. 

 Like in any other language, certain verbs in Chinese are used all the time in daily life and can help you express basic but essential sentences to be understood by everyone in China. In this article, we will present to you the most common Chinese verbs followed by sample sentences with characters, pinyin, explanation and English translation.

In our previous article, we talked about how to use Chinese measure words to quantify nouns. Today, we will see how to use verbal measure words to quantify actions. In this article, we will teach you how to use the 5 most common ones.  

Unlike in English, quantifying common names or actions in Chinese is quite complex. There is no equivalent in Chinese to defined articles such as ‘the','a','an'). In order to quantify something, the Chinese language uses numbers/demonstratives followed by a measure word. There are different measure words for different categories of names/actions.  

Watching videos is one of the best ways to improve your Mandarin listening skills when you are not living in China. By watching videos, you can not only learn new words and listen to different accents, but also know more about Chinese culture. The advantage of these channels is that they all have Chinese subtitles (and actually most of them also have English ones), so you can not only listen but also try to read at the same time, and write down what you think is interesting to learn. Thus, your reading and writing skills will improve as well.