Blog
Notes on reading Chinese: HSK, vocabulary, and China today.
Singles' Day in Chinese
11 November started as 光棍节, a student joke about being single, and became 双十一, China's biggest shopping festival. Here are the words for it: 预售, 定金 and 尾款, 满减, 凑单, 剁手, and a lot of 快递.
Nov 2, 2026 · 6 minRead 
Dengdeng v2 is here
Dengdeng v2 adds character chats, Beginner stories, cartoons, and a new Today screen. Available now on Android, with the iOS release to follow.
Oct 19, 2026 · 3 minRead 
Double Ninth Festival in Chinese
The Double Ninth Festival (重阳节) falls on the ninth day of the ninth lunar month: Sunday 18 October in 2026. People climb hills, look at chrysanthemums, and visit their grandparents. Here are the words behind it, from 登高 and 重阳糕 to 老年节, Seniors' Day.
Oct 14, 2026 · 6 minRead 
What you can read in Chinese with HSK 1 and 2
With HSK 1 and 2 you can read short, supported texts: simple sentences, with word lookup for the rest. The 497 HSK 1 words cover about 60% of everyday speech, and HSK 2 takes you to about 72%. Here is what that means on the page.
Oct 12, 2026 · 6 minRead 
How spoken Chinese questions and connecting words work
In 87,000 example sentences, 吗 and question words do almost all the asking. 虽然 usually keeps 但是. 因为 drops 所以 most of the time.
Oct 7, 2026 · 6 minRead 
What 就 (jiù) means in Chinese
就 (jiù) most often means “then”. It can also mean “as soon as”, “already”, “only”, “exactly” or, in 就算, “even if”. Each use with example sentences from Tatoeba.
Oct 6, 2026 · 9 minRead 
We trained a Chinese language model with 1,243 words
We trained a tiny Chinese language model for fun, using 1,243 words from low HSK levels. Try it here, and see what a restricted vocabulary does—and doesn’t—control.
Oct 3, 2026 · 7 minRead 
Dengdeng is now on Android
Dengdeng is available on Google Play. Read daily Chinese stories at three levels, tap words for pinyin and meaning, and practice the words you choose on Android or iOS.
Oct 3, 2026 · 2 minRead 
How many Chinese measure words you need
Chinese measure words sit between the number and the noun. Across 87,000 sentences, one word does a third of the work, eighteen cover four-fifths, and the long tail is learned with the nouns you read.
Sep 30, 2026 · 7 minRead 
Why Chinese people drink hot water
In China, the standard advice for a cold, a headache, or a bad day is 多喝热水: drink more hot water. The habit is younger than it looks. It spread with the public health campaigns of the 1950s, and then it became a meme.
Sep 29, 2026 · 5 minRead 
National Day Golden Week in Chinese
China's National Day holiday, 黄金周, runs from 1 to 7 October. Here are the words people use about it online: 调休 and 补班, 抢票, 人从众, 堵车, and the people who choose 反向旅游.
Sep 28, 2026 · 6 minRead 
Chinese characters with more than one pronunciation
One in five of the hundred commonest Chinese characters changes its pronunciation depending on the word it is in. We measured how common that is, and why a word in context beats an isolated character card.
Sep 26, 2026 · 8 minRead 
Mid-Autumn Festival words in Chinese
The Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节) falls on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month: Friday 25 September in 2026. Here are the words behind it, from 赏月 and 团圆 to the mooncake fillings people argue about.
Sep 24, 2026 · 6 minRead 
The most popular Chinese internet slang of 2025
China's 2025 internet-words list had DeepSeek, a toast, and a cartoon. The Shanghai magazine 咬文嚼字 runs its own December list: 内卷 in 2020, 搭子 and 情绪价值 in 2023. A few of those words are now ordinary Chinese.
Sep 23, 2026 · 9 minRead 
How the Chinese internet talks about AI slop
AI垃圾 means “AI garbage.” Here are Chinese terms for low-quality AI content, AI labels, and AI味.
Sep 21, 2026 · 7 minRead 
Spoken vs written Chinese
You can hold a conversation in Chinese and still stall on a news article. Across 33.5 million words of speech and 100,000 news sentences, comfortable news reading needs on the order of fifteen to thirty thousand more words than talking does.
Sep 19, 2026 · 8 minRead 
Automatic pinyin transliteration is harder than it seems
We scored five pinyin systems in six configurations — two LLM setups, an open BERT model, a phrase-table library, and our own — on 184,372 editor-checked characters. Dictionary lookup is only the start: tones, mixed text, and alignment decide the result.
Sep 17, 2026 · 12 minRead 
Western brand names in Chinese
BMW is a precious horse. Subway promises a hundred flavours. A photo tour of the familiar brands whose Chinese names are much less familiar.
Sep 15, 2026 · 8 minRead 
Introducing Dengdeng Dictionary
Our free Chinese–English dictionary is live. Fast word lookup, with links to related meanings, shared characters, and the parts of a word.
Sep 14, 2026 · 3 minRead 
Could you do an office job with HSK 3?
The HSK 3 list matched 60.4% of the words in our AI-authored office week. Read the scenes and check which work terms fall outside the list.
Sep 13, 2026 · 6 minRead 
How hard is each HSK level
HSK 1 words account for about 60% of the words in a 33-million-word subtitle corpus. That does not mean you understand 60% of a conversation. We measured how much each HSK band adds.
Sep 12, 2026 · 8 minRead 
Introducing Dengdeng
Read real stories from China, in Chinese you can read. Tap a word for pinyin and meaning. Those words become your review.
Sep 10, 2026 · 3 minRead 
