Generally speaking, when the foreign students start to study Chinese language, they need to learn characters firstly. After that, they should learn some basic but important language points to connect the characters together to express the complete meaning. Some students choose to study by staying in their own countries. But the best place to learn Chinese is in China because you will be influenced by the environment and have more chances to practice your Chinese.

In oral Chinese, 比方说is usually heard which carries the meaning of “for example”. Therefore, it is often followed by some actual examples for the function of further illustrating or complementing the conditions mentioned in the previous. For example, many students can make sentences like 我去过中国很多大城市，比方说北京、上海、香港什么的.

Another important structure you often see may be 不是……而是…… which is use to connect two clauses to make a complete sentence. Usually in this structure, the part after 不是is the condition being negated while that after 而是is the real situation. After making this point clear, you can make sentence like 河北省的西边不是陕西省，而是山西省.

In addition, if you attend to Chinese school in Kunming to study Chinese, teachers would teach you the pattern A和/跟B有（…的）关系/无关. First of all, this structure is applied to illustrate there is some relation between people or things or no relation with each other. According to the degree of the relationships, the front of 前面can add relevant modifiers such as 一定的，很大的，密切的and直接的. 无关can be also 毫无关系or毫无关联. For instance, 在我看来，隐私观念的变化跟社会制度有一定的关系.

For the structure 除非…否则…, the part after 除非is the only condition of certain things. Only this condition is satisfied can certain results will be produced, or it won’t. Just like the sentence often said by most Chinese people 除非我亲眼看见，否则我不会相信有这种事情.