Author: Mischa Wilmers
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Three Ways Native Speakers React to Chinese Learners
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Below is a video of me being interviewed in Mandarin on YouTuber Will Hart’s channel. Two years ago I hosted a party for the language exchange group I run. My guests included a mixture of Chinese and English friends who were all keen to practice their language skills. Some brought along friends of their own…
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Cracking the Intermediate Plateau (Podcast)
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*The I’m Learning Mandarin Podcast is now available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. As an intermediate Mandarin learner, one of the main challenges I face is acquiring lower-frequency words. In any language, the most frequent few thousand words account for over 90% of words used in daily conversation. Mandarin is no different and, although I…
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Can You Speak A Foreign Language With 400 Words?
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Two years ago I had an experience which completely altered my perspective on language learning. I travelled to Taiwan for a three-week trip and quickly realised I had vastly overestimated my proficiency in Chinese. I had hoped the trip would consolidate all my studies over the previous two years. In my naive state as a…
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Why I Don’t Believe in Language Talent
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Below is a video of me being interviewed in Mandarin on YouTuber Will Hart’s channel. I used to think there was such a thing as language talent. I used to think I had language talent. At school, teachers would tell me I was good at French. I seemed to make progress more easily than other…
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Learning Mandarin in a Pandemic (Podcast)
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*The I’m Learning Mandarin Podcast is now available on Apple Podcasts as well as Spotify. The global pandemic has had a profound influence on the way we study languages. On the downside, restrictions have made it difficult to travel abroad. Yet the ongoing crisis has also led to record numbers of people taking on a…
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Learning Characters with Hack Chinese (Podcast)
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One of the most daunting aspects of learning Chinese is the sheer number of characters required for basic literacy. It’s estimated that comfortably reading a newspaper requires around 3000 characters, whilst an educated native speaker will typically know in excess of 7000. Memorising such a high number of characters is not an easy task but…
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Letting Go of Mandarin Learning Delusions
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Around a year ago I fell into a common trap for Mandarin learners. I started to prematurely believe that I was on the verge of becoming “fluent” in the language. My confidence was not baseless, rather it was rooted in the fact that after years of failing to learn Chinese, I’d finally discovered an effective…
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This Tutor Almost Made Me Give Up Learning Chinese
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Most of my experiences with Chinese tutors over the years have been excellent and I have benefited from their guidance immensely. However, a couple of years ago I had a bizarre experience online which I have since discovered may be part of a widespread and ugly ploy some tutors use to lure in naive students.…
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Immersion Vs Structured Learning (Podcast)
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Anyone who studies a language has to combine a mixture of approaches that broadly fall into two categories: naturalistic and structured. Naturalistic approaches involve learning through immersion in the target language environment, reading books, watching TV and having conversations. Structured approaches involve focused and deliberate study, such as learning grammar rules, memorising vocabulary, and repetition…
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Reading Novels is the Best Mandarin Hack
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Those of us learning Chinese from abroad often struggle to replicate the levels of immersion students based in China take for granted. This is especially true for speaking and listening, where being surrounded by the language and constantly interacting with native speakers is ideal for an intermediate learner. However, when it comes to reading there…
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