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I hadn't heard of this before going, but thankfully I didn't experience anything like this. There were enough hikers on the trail where I never really felt alone. In fact, I actually made a few friends along the way (and I'm pretty introverted - so that really speaks to the friendliness of the travelers on the trail). The only person who bothered me at all was a local who insisted I ride his horse up the 28 bends (for a fee, of course) but he was completely harmless and left me alone after I told him no twenty-or-so times.

Well, tested it out today....amazing! Straight in without a visa. So easy. Just to add to it, my bags were first off the carousel!

Hi I'm post grad and am looking for a scholarship where I can study mandarin in China. Does anyone know of anything? Thanks! Sorry if asked a lot.

Bear in mind that summer, the time of year for Larry's proposed trip, is rainy season in most of Yunnan and definitely in and around Lijiang. That will impact what you are able to do outdoors. When these summer rains come (starting in late June) they typically include violent downpours which make roads impassible and cause mud slides. Plus they are sudden. I once went out for supper in Lijiang in August. Rains came. Streets flooded. I was stuck in the restaurant until well after midnight. My hotel finally organized a high-clearance farm truck to come get us. Cars and ordinary small trucks were disabled by the side of the roads, in some cases with water nearly up to their windows. Needless to say, any plans to hike Tiger Leaping Gorge that weekend would have had to be suspended.

I recently finished the manga Mob Psycho 100, what a wonderful story and really funny as well, although the humour is a double-edged sword (pretty hard to follow at times). I also loved the art style. I am currently halfway through 呐喊, a collection of short stories by 鲁迅. The first page (and only the first page...) is written in classical chinese, which almost scared me away. Btw this was my first encounter with classical chinese and it is brutal, my arrogant self always thought "how hard could it be?" but it really does feel like a different language! Other than that the writing actually felt surprisingly modern, I was expeccting more archaic grammar, but other than some odd vocabulary it is fairly easy to read. So far most of the stories are social commentary, so even if I tried to do some research on the cultural context I probably missed a lot of the value, but I'm learning a lot of interesting stuff. Same with the humour, I recognized a couple of wordplays and most likely missed the majority. Even with these limitations, the stories are very enjoyable, but I definitely want to revisit this book (and other Lu Xun books) in the future.

Hi, Nazim! I'm willing to help you with your Chinese when I have the time. My email address is e@cncorrect.com. You can email me anytime. My website is https://www.cncorrect.com/.

Many thanks for your detailed reply. In terms of safety I had also heard of the occasional report of solo hikers being subjected to personal safety issues. Not sure if there's any truth in this?

I guess the difference between the two will be more than just words! That's to say, if you pass 2.0-HSK4, then learn 2004 new words, then take the 3.0-HSK4, you'll fail. Similarly with the Business Chinese test, there's a difference between knowing for instance how 莫非 is used versus knowing the difference between 国债 and 债券.

Be sure to include the lake. It's the biggest inland lake in China and very scenic. Salt water. I didn't believe it until I tasted it. Went there by public bus in late spring or early summer, but don't remember the route. 青海湖

Hello friends, I have 3 purposes for posting this: 1. I'm asking if there are any former students of Donghua here who could provide me with their name. The registration fee is waived when an old student recommends the school to me. 2. I'm asking if anyone is planning to attend the summer camp this year (2024) and would like to meet up. 3. I'm asking if anyone would like to share their experiences of attending this university. Any input is much appreciated.

Literally hours ago I learned that I have to cancel a very similar trip I had booked... I didn't need to see this post right now haha. Anyways enjoy the trip!

@Confucious I took the written HSK3 exam in 2022 and we were given a separate answer sheet where we had to fill in our answers. So yes, we had to rewrite all the characters in the proper order.

Anyone have recommendations for Qinghai (or Gansu)? Wife and I planning a somewhat ambitious driving trip very soon from Beijing through 山西，陕西，甘肃, 青海，宁夏. We have most of May, we both can drive. Basically aiming for round trip to Dunhuang and back. Kind of something like the map attached (but the qinghai part is just a line because I have no idea). Shanxi, Shaanxi we are going to stop at a few less popular places, no Xian as I've been there many times. Then from Yan'an approach Gansu or Qinghai. Gansu seems pretty self explanatitory(at least the western part, but I'm not quite sure about Qinghai. Such a large province. I'm trying to decide if I want to go Qinghai first and then up to Dunhuang or get to Dunhuang and then head down to Qinghai. Also unsure if I should attempt driving all the way down to Yushu or just stick to the North part of the province. Anyone have any first hand experience in Qinghai, what to see where to go, routes? I'm researching online, but I thought I'd ask here too. I will probably put pictures from the trip on my blog as we go.

Larry, I have now spent 3 days in Lijiang and I shake my head at all the Reddit threads that say it is like a fake Disneyland. Lijiang Old Town is certainly very touristy, but even there you may suddenly find yourself alone in a beautiful side street Further, there is more to Lijiang, e. g. Baisha Old Town, Shuhe Old Town, Jade Water Village, Black Dragon pool, Lashihai Wetland park, wonderful Naxi farmer's markets, etc. If you rent a scooter, you can go off the beaten path to amazing places. Today I saw "wild roaming" horses, cows, goats, etc..

Larry, How much time do you have for this China trip, from touchdown in country to take-off? This makes a big difference in time-allocation decisions.

I agree with @Lus advice. You definitely don't want to pass through 北京 without seeing the sights. I'd get a hotel room somewhere in the Hutong area, experience a bit of Beijing and then go study in Yunnan. I can recommend a few accommodations and a good Great Wall trip, you can pm me if you want, also would be happy to meet up for a beer in the hutongs if I'm in town.

Depends on what you want. It's totally doable to just get a hotel and see Beijing on your own (either on your way to Yunnan or on the way back, when your Chinese will be a little bit better). Finding a teacher by yourself for a short period is not something I'd recommend. It would take time to organise that, you'd have to hope you find a teacher that suits you right away, if the teacher suddenly is not available, or less good, or whatever, you'd have to find a new one, etc. If you want to study in Beijing, best just book a language school there. Either LTL or one of the many other schools. If I were you I think I'd visit Beijing on the way, and do the actual studying in Yunnan.

I have had another addition to my considerations too. Since to get to Kunming the flights I checked all go to Beijing first, I realized I should take advantage of this and see Beijing before starting at Kunming. I don't know whether it would be better to just get a hotel and see Beijing on my own, maybe find a teacher, or study at LTL School in Beijing. I've always wanted to try them too. They are pretty expensive however compared to Keats, and thats just the classes only!

Thanks so much for your response! I was hoping you would see this and respond since I had read that you lived there many years and have lots of experience there!

In Rosetta Stone, that occurs because the company uses a standard set of sentences for all languages, rather than sentences particularly tailored to each language. Thus the absurdity of having no chopsticks or jiaozi in a Chinese course and instead, tennis and roast beef. Could it be the same for Glossika?

I did a ton of hiking at the time, so most of the route was pretty manageable. That said, I do remember being pretty winded by the end of the "28 bends". It's something like 2,000 ft of elevation gain in a very short stretch, plus you're climbing from 6,000ft - 8,000ft which adds to the cardio-vascular difficulty. In terms of safety, I had heard the same. Specifically, I had heard not to hike it in the rain as there was a risk that you could slip off the trail in places. While the trail is pretty exposed, it was also pretty wide and flat (not slanted into the cliff, which would have made me worried). In the end, I DID hike it in the rain and I felt 100% safe the whole time. The one part that was a bit sketchy; the entrance is in the middle of nowhere. I had to have my hotel negotiate a ride out and back for me in a taxi. I paid upfront and just trusted that the driver would come back to get me two days later. Thankfully, he did and I was able to get back. I probably could have asked one of the guest houses along the way to call me a taxi as an alternative, but my Chinese skills were not too great at the time, so it would have been a bit of a challenge. All-in-all it is one of the greatest travel memories I have of anywhere in the world. It truly felt like an adventure. I would highly recommend it.

@Tomsima Congratulations on completing it! Valid points, indeed. However, I still stand by my judgment. This was only one example out of many others that I didn't bother with screenshots. A premium price tag mandates premium quality, especially when made by an actual linguist who genuinely cares about languages and not some random corporation worried about their bottom line. The second annoyance I forgot to add because new members on this forum don't have editing privileges for their posts (another strange choice) is the overuse of foreign names. Ostensibly, if you're living in a Mandarin-speaking environment, the probability of using "Vanessa" or "Tamara" or "Malika" or "Jamaal" in daily speech is very low. No idea why actual Chinese names were ignored, which would make logical sense. To that end, Glossika would have to record the most common names in each language/culture and that would be time-consuming. Again, if you're a dedicated linguist I think you'd care about such things instead of adopting a cookie-cutter approach wholesale. I'm only critical because because I want Glossika to outshine the competition and put out quality work. I hold someone like Mike to a higher standard. Ironically, he points out the same issues, and rightfully so, with his competition. I just don't waste my breath constructively criticizing the lazy, garbage content put out by rival companies that are solely driven by profit and gamification for customer retention. I hope Mike earnestly takes in such feedback and polishes up this diamond in the rough.

I have completed the whole of the Mandarin package (granted, it is overpriced...), there are a few of these kinds of sentences, but ultimately I think its a necessity for being able to do sentence recall for what would otherwise be ambiguous. There seem to be two situations where this kind of oddity arises: 1. There is a very similar sentence somewhere else in the database, perhaps 他们在读书 which is then paired with 'They're reading books'. To avoid ambiguity, the sentence then paired here uses a more direct translation 'looking at', to jog your memory. I do this all the time with my anki cards in order to remember subtle differences, eg. 从头到脚 'from head to toe'， 从头到尾 'from beginning to tail end' (rather than both being the more often used 'from top to bottom'. 2. The sentence was originally part of a dialogue that was then split into individual sentences for the database. In the dialogue the bad translation is not labelled as 'bad' because the context made it clear to the reviewer. In this case you can flag it and the maintainers will review and change (I think I probably flagged around 20-30 sentences altogether) I'm not trying to justify mistakes in what is ultimately an expensive service, but in some cases Mike may have in fact seen and intentionally kept some awkward translations for the sake of avoiding ambiguity.

Glossika's basic English mistakes are starting to make me question my own mother tongue. This obviously means, "They are reading books." "Looking at books?" Who says that? I'm dumbfounded. Mike's Mandarin is impressive and he's a native English speaker so how does this glaring mistake go overlooked. It was in the old PDFs and I signed up for their online platform to see if they cleaned up these issues... nope, no quality control checks. The online platform is: 1. woefully overpriced, 2. probably has more typos past the initial 3000 sentences, 3. offers little user control (only allows you pause the audio in full practice mode, not listening when doing reps). I already assumed it made more sense to sentence mine from textbooks and native resources, or have native speakers audio record sentences to make audio Anki flashcards. True, it takes time but complete control of the creation/editing/review process is guaranteed. Glossika is wonderful is concept, but sorely lacks in delivery.

Link is in the original post, 倉頡之友 has since released an updated 2022 version 《倉頡平台2022》which works on both Windows 10 and 11. I have used 倉頡平台 for many years now for typing Cangjie 5, can recommend.