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My guest on this episode is Lei Lei, a blogger and Mandarin Chinese learner who writes about the process of learning Chinese to a high level. After stumbling across Lei Lei’s blog a couple of months ago there were a couple of themes I thought would make for a great discussion.
The first point is something we have in common which is that we are both bilingual learners. Lei Lei was brought up in Canada and was educated in French whilst English was always used in the family home. I was interested in exploring how being bilingual has affected our approach and attitude to language learning.
The second point was that Lei Lei has written an insightful blog about reaching high levels of listening proficiency. With so much focus on tones and characters, listening is perhaps the most underestimated aspect of Mandarin learning in terms of difficulty. The number of homophones and a large variety of accents spoken across China means becoming good at listening doesn’t happen overnight.
Fortunately, Lei Lei has some great tips on how to reach impressive levels of listening comprehension which we can all learn from.