How I Accurately Mimic Full-Speed Mandarin In Four Simple Steps

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Recently a member of our Discord server posted a short clip of a native Mandarin speaker saying a sentence in mid-conversation at full-blown speed.

The sentence was: 这么复杂的东西怎么学得会啊不可能的嘛对吧。Zhème fùzá de dōngxī zěnme xué de huì a bù kěnéng de ma duì ba. Something this complicated, how could I possibly learn it? It’s impossible, right?

The challenge was laid out for members of the server to mimic the sentence and post their attempts on the thread to receive feedback from other learners.

So I decided to deploy the methods I often use to mimic native speech and give it a go.

In this episode I’m going to break down step by step how I went from struggling to keep up, to being able to deliver the sentence with natural rhythm and accurate tones at lightning speed.

A word of caution, this sentence was particularly challenging, so if you don’t have much experience mimicking Mandarin, it’s advisable to start with something shorter and much slower.

Mischa Wilmers