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…
Learning to read Chinese properly takes years. Learning to read the signs that actually matter — which way is out, what this shop sells, how much that costs, whether you are about to do something forbidden — takes a weekend…
Staying active in China is easy once you know where people actually go, and confusing until you do. There are commercial gyms with monthly memberships, campus facilities that are free or nearly free, twenty-four-hour self-service gyms you enter with a…
One of the biggest surprises for students arriving in China is that winter is two different experiences depending on where your university is. North of the traditional heating line, buildings are warm enough that people wear t-shirts indoors in January…
Finding a flat is usually the first thing that makes a new city feel real — and the first thing that can go expensively wrong. The listings are mostly in Chinese, the photos are optimistic, and the person showing you…
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…
Ask for 一水 in a shop and you will be understood; ask for 一个水 and you will be understood and instantly marked as a textbook learner. Measure words (量词) are the little words that sit between a number and its…
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…
Nothing prepares a newcomer for the first Golden Week: the campus empties, train tickets vanish weeks in advance, and half the city closes for eight days while the other half doubles its hours. China’s holiday system is generous, predictable and…
Money is one of those topics nobody explains until it goes wrong. Can you bring cash in? How does your family pay your rent from abroad? What happens when you want to convert your leftover RMB at the end of…