Chinese New Year is on January 26, 2009. This is the most important festival of the year in Chinese culture, a time for family reunions, fireworks, wonderful feasts, and red envelopes.

Get ready for the Year of the Ox by practicing these Chinese New Year greetings and phrases. Each entry has an audio clip for pronunciation and listening practice.

Here's a neat trick to add Pinyin or Zhuyin to any Chinese text. In Microsoft Word, paste some Chinese characters.

Select all the text (CTL A) and click on the file menu: Format > Asian Layout > Phonetic Guide.

The selected text will have phonetics, and there are a few options for positioning them and changing their size.

If you are seeing Zhuyin phonetics and would prefer Pinyin, (or vice versa) you may need to change the formatting of the Chinese characters. Select the text, click on the file menu: Format > Reveal Formatting. In the sidebox that pops up, you can change the language settings to PRC for Pinyin or Taiwan for Zhuyin.

If you still can't see the Pinyin phonetics, you may need to install MSPY (Microsoft Pinyin Input Method), available from the Microsoft website: http://www.microsoft.com/china/windows/products/ime/MSPY2007.mspx

You can find more information about this feature from Pinyin Joe's Chinese Computing Help Desk.

A recent article on LiveMint.com talks about the challenges of learning Mandarin.

The author, V.R. Narayanaswami, writes about some of the differences between Mandarin and English: sentence structure, grammar, tones, and measure words. These are the stumbling blocks for Westerners learning Mandarin.

However, as Mr. Narayanaswami shows, continued practice and study of the language allows the student to integrate the rules of Mandarin into increasingly fluent speech.

So don't get discouraged with your Mandarin studies. In many ways, Mandarin is a lot simpler than Western languages - no verb conjugations, no plurals, no tenses, unchanging pronouns and a straight-forward numbering system.

Mandarin fractions follow a fairly simple pattern. The trick is - you say them the opposite of English. So if you want to say "two thirds" in Mandarin, the literal translation is "three is the whole, two is the part."

Decimal fractions are easier, but be sure to learn both ways to say Mandarin fractions.