The China Helper
Your practical guide to studying, living and learning in China.
If you are coming to China to study a degree programme in English, or arriving on a scholarship that includes a language year, you will spend a surprising amount of your week in a Chinese classroom — and it will…
In most countries, bills arrive as paper you grudgingly pay. In China, most utilities run through your wallet app, a chunk of them are prepaid, and the first time your electricity cuts out mid-cooking you will learn the system very…
Most people arrive assuming friendship here will be difficult and find instead that it is easy in one direction and strangely hard in another. You will be invited to things within days. People will feed you, show you around, add…
Ordering food is the first conversation most students have in Chinese, and it is the one that repays practice fastest — you get to eat afterwards, and you will repeat it three times a day. What makes it feel hard…
Temporary residence registration for foreigners: who must register, the 24-hour deadline, documents, the PSB process, fines, and student-specific notes.
The panic usually arrives about a week before departure, when someone tells you that Chinese food is pork all the way down. It is not. A country with this much Buddhist history, this much vegetable-forward regional cooking and a Muslim…
Most international students default into a dorm without ever comparing it to the alternative — and most are glad they did, at least for the first semester. But dorms and off-campus flats are genuinely different products, with different paperwork, different…
At some point in your first semester you will need medicine at a moment when you cannot read a single word on any box in the shop. That is the real problem this guide solves — not the theory of…
China is, by most measures, a safe country to live in — violent crime against foreigners is rare and walking home late is unremarkable in most cities. The risks that do exist are different from what you may be used…
Almost every beginner meets Chinese through handwriting practice, and then discovers that real life runs the other way: you will type Chinese far more often than you write it. A message to your landlord, a delivery address, a note in…