Stop Confusing These Chinese Words

If you’re new to our channel, we are Luke Neale and Phil Crimmins, the co-founders and co-CEOs of Mandarin Blueprint. Our company is focused on one mission: To make learning Chinese simple and rewarding. We do this by creating ground-breaking courses, services, and community for Mandarin learners like you.

How we got here:

2013:
We both started learning Chinese in Chengdu, Sichuan province (China). Phil got a degree in Chinese from Sichuan University. Luke went the self-study route.
We both struggled a lot for the first year, wasting thousands of hours and thousands of dollars getting nowhere.
2014:
We both almost quit, until we discovered the magic of ‘comprehensible input’. We used proven memory techniques to achieve advanced literacy in a few months, and began immersing in Chinese TV, movies, books, comics, and podcasts.
2015:
Within a year, we went from failures, to passing the highest level Chinese exam at the time (the HSK 6), and achieved B2 spoken fluency. We did this learning part time, while it should take a FULL TIME learner at least twice as long (that works out to at least 4x faster).
We became tired of everyone we knew falling into the same traps we did, struggling needlessly. We decided to share what we knew with the local community in Chengdu.
2016-2018:
We started Mandarin Blueprint. We spent 100s of hours teaching what we knew in live and online seminars, gradually developing our own curriculum.
2019-2024: We officially launched our online video curriculum, and continually improved and perfected the content, community, and various supplementary courses.
TODAY: Our paid membership Mandarin Blueprint Pro is taking the Mandarin-learning world by storm, making Chinese simple and rewarding for thousands of learners.

To our fellow Mandarin enthusiasts! Whether you’re learning this language to...

Connect more with a friend or family member,
Improve your career prospects,
Travel the world,
Massively raise your status as a human being
OR purely for fun, the challenge, or sheer love of the process…

…you are on a highly worthwhile mission. Chinese is NOT “hard”. It is MADE hard by methods that SUCK.

Our method does NOT suck.

(We’ll get back to you within a few hours)

保重 (take care)
Luke & Phil

Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
00:57 - HSK 1
4:47 - HSK 2
18:10 - HSK 3
34:48 - HSK 4
1:03:07 - HSK 5
1:28:09 - HSK 6

[pilou]

Probably the best instructor (diction English AND Chinese; clarity; choice of examples; personality) on the net. Learnt more here in 1 hour than from all my former coaches, personal work, etc in last 2 years.

[pohlpiano]

Along with this one, if there was a top ten list of must watch YouTube videos for Chinese learners, Mandarin Blueprint could easily grab half of the spots.

[bennyorthner]

Knocked it out of the park with this video. So much super useful stuff. Will definitely be coming back to this over and over

[brauklys]

You are doing good work, do not stop.

[Steadylife]

Thank you to the MB Team for sharing their knowledge, sent a small thanks for all your hard work.

[silviamunoz]

The two verbs for "to know" are easy for me, because in the Romance languages (Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, etc) we have different verbs to "have knowledge" of something (saber) and "have met, recognize" something or somebody (conocer).

[小索妃]

Thank you. It's nice to see a youtube channel related to languages that isn't a total fraud like these people claiming to have fluency in 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 20, 30+ languages. Thank you so much for what you do. I wish you the greatest success on YouTube. <3

[joshbaughman]

A helpful way to think about 知道 and 认识 is, if you have studied Spanish, it’s like saber vs conocer (but obviously not a perfect comparison)

[MrSHAQbballZACH]

EVERY person learning Chinese should watch this video! Exceptionally clear and well done. Learnt so much from this video, cheers

[Oukemy]

👋I started evening Chinese classes a few weeks ago. I am French and fluent in English. I'm learning 中文 from both french and english.💪
I realize that we also have a lot of different words to apply in certain contexts, but French people have become lazy 😅. It's good to dig in and bring it all out to understand the nuances of the Chinese language.

[yohanchen]

The term "情" sometimes conveys the meaning of a situation or the state of affairs, as seen in words like 情況 (situation), 情形 (condition), 情報 (information), and 情勢 (circumstance). Therefore, in the word 事情, it might be used with this meaning.

[MubarakNaibi]

Honestly, your videos are one of the best :) Thank you for your hard work. 10/10!

[EduardoOrlandoLizarragaGarcia]

this is one the best videos you've made so far. it helped me a lot

[shalbic]

How I differentiate 东西 and 事情 is that I think of what is tangible and what is intangible. 东西 - things I can touch physically. 事情 - things I can't touch physically.

[williampennjr.]

A simpler way to remember it, is anytime you would use' have ' you use ' meiyou' to negate it.
This is because anytime did something in the past, ' have' is there even if it's not said, like' I ate ' is short for I have eaten.

[mary]

this is so helpfull, I've been following this channel for a while and it helped sm

[dwellinj]

This is going to take me some time to work through, I've only got a bit of the way in and already it is well worth it! So much good information that I haven't come across anywhere!

[juliag.]

This Video is gold! So effctive. Thanks a lot! Great teacher'!

[davidkrsek]

This was very helpful...Keep up with your amazing work thank you so much!

[Plkkno]

Loving the videos!! You don't mess about.