Learn and shop

China’s Tmall, a website similar to Amazon that hosts online boutiques and branded microsites, has launched a Chinese Academy microsite for the country’s growing non-Chinese-speaking population. 

Owned by Chinese megasystem Alibaba, Tmall’s vast network of branded shops and curated boutiques are Mandarin-only at present. The pedagogic microsite helps China’s foreign residents to shop and learn Chinese at the same time, following the dictum ‘I shop therefore I learn’.

On the site, designed by Anomaly to mimic a Chinese school textbook, flash cards on grid-like paper introduce useful phrases for shopping and humorous idioms for a laugh. Chinese followers can learn and then look up terms such as gan cui mian (crunchy noodles) – ‘Dry instant noodles that kids eat as a snack. A sinful pleasure in life.’