About

Our new Ayi is great, except for her propensity to gossip. We'll tell her things like what we had for

breakfast or how much sleep we got the night before, and the next thing you know she's shared that

on Weibo and Facebook and then we're getting inbound telephone calls from strangers in Henan with

occasionally useful but somewhat overfamiliar advice. Truth be told, we're not sure exactly how to deal

with it, since she does a really good job otherwise.

Learning Chinese? In this lesson, we cover an incredibly useful expression that is unfairly ignored by

textbooks worldwide. And in the process, we try to illustrate one of the nicest things about learning mandarin: the looser grammatical structure makes many Chinese expressions more flexible and universally

applicable than their English counterparts.