Tag: Mandarin
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The American Professor Who Performed Live Mandarin Comedy in Front of a Billion People (podcast)
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*This podcast is available on Apple, Spotify and Google My guest today is David Moser, an Associate Professor at Beijing Capital Normal University. He’s had a fascinating and varied career in academia teaching courses in Chinese history and politics and authoring books on Mandarin grammar and the unification of the Chinese language. There’s so much…
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Building an App to Achieve Native Chinese Reading Skills (Podcast)
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*This podcast is available on Apple, Spotify and Google My guest on today’s podcast is computer scientist and educational technologist, Emmanuel Roche. Emmanuel has more than 35 years of experience learning Chinese. He began his Mandarin odyssey in the late 80s, studying the language at university. However, he quickly became frustrated at how inefficient teaching…
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Three Things You Need To Know Before You Study Chinese in Taiwan (Podcast)
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Recently I decided to commit to producing the I’m Learning Mandarin podcast once a week instead of fortnightly. The plan is to continue posting guest interviews and discussions about learning Mandarin once a fortnight. Then, in between each interview, I’ll post shorter episodes in which I speak in Mandarin about a topic. Today’s episode is…
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What is Micro-Fluency and Why Should You Aim for It?
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Duncan Parrish is an educational technologist and coordinator of Arti Languages, a project using mobile games and cognitive science to enhance how we immerse in Chinese. In this guest post, he introduces the concept of “micro-fluency” and argues that it can help us set achievable and useful language goals. On the Trans-Mongolian train from Ulaanbaatar…
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Why Memorising Chinese HSK Vocab Lists is a Bad Idea
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In a previous post, I discussed why language proficiency tests are largely a waste of time as they distract you from working towards your real goals. Most learners dream of having free-flowing conversations in Mandarin, not answering multiple-choice questions at lightning speed. Speaking fluently and passing tests are two separate skills, both of which require…
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How did people learn languages in centuries gone by? (Podcast)
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*This podcast is available on Apple, Spotify and Google If you google “what’s the best way to learn a language”, you’ll be bombarded with hundreds of different methods, each claiming to be completely original and groundbreaking. But if we study history, we’ll discover many of these modern approaches are actually very similar to the ways…
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Interview with Hacking Chinese Founder Olle Linge (Podcast)
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*This podcast is available on Apple, Spotify and Google In today’s episode, I interview one of my most hotly anticipated guests, the Mandarin educator, blogger and teacher, Olle Linge. Olle is well known for being the founder of the blog Hacking Chinese. For over a decade, he’s been drawing on his extensive experience of learning…
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Reflecting on 2023 in Taiwan & Plans for 2024!
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2023 has been an eventful year, both in terms of my own Mandarin learning journey as well as the Chinese education projects I’ve been involved with! At the start of the year I moved to Taipei for my first ever experience of living in a Chinese speaking country. I spent the first few weeks travelling…
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Can You Really Be Understood If You Ignore Chinese Tones?
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Recently I came across an interesting research paper investigating the popular claim that native speakers can still understand Mandarin learners who ignore tones. The paper is called Knocking tones off their perch: investigating the intelligibility ofAnglophone beginner learners of Mandarin Chinese. Its author, Robert Neal, coordinator for the Swire Chinese Centre, took secondary school Chinese…
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Fewer Students are Taking Chinese at University. But Online Self Directed Learning is Booming!
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Recently the Times reported the number of British pupils studying foreign languages has more than halved over the last 20 years. Only 131,000 pupils took French GCSE this summer, down from 331,000 in 2003. A similar slump was observed for other modern foreign languages (MFL). This downward trend has also negatively impacted the number of…
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