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 ...
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 ...