Tag: Mandarin
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Catch-up with Will Hart: Nailing Sentence Structure & Visiting China for the First Time (Podcast)
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*This podcast is available on Apple, Spotify and Google One year ago I interviewed someone who totally transformed my perspective on learning to speak Chinese. By now, listeners to this podcast will be familiar with Will Hart, the Mandarin learning phenomenon who became incredibly fluent in Chinese within the space of just a year and…
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Five Ways I’ve Changed My Mind About Learning Chinese
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My approaches to studying Chinese have evolved quite a bit since I first started this blog two years ago. Broadly speaking my view on how we learn languages remains similar: I still believe we need huge amounts of input to acquire our target language and continue to advocate an immersive approach to Chinese learning. But…
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Learn Chinese With Instagram Star Jiaqi Laoshi (Podcast)
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(This podcast is available on Apple, Spotify and Google) When I think back to all the Chinese tutors I’ve had in the past, the best have without fail been those with a passion for learning languages themselves. They draw on their own experiences of overcoming language learning challenges to help others acquire Chinese. My guest…
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I Conducted an Experiment to See if I Could Overcome Chinese Accent Fossilisation. Here are the Results
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Over the past few years, I’ve been conducting an experiment on myself to see whether it’s possible to undo deeply entrenched Chinese pronunciation mistakes, otherwise known as fossilisation. For the first four years of learning Chinese, I didn’t pay much focused attention to tones. As a result, like many foreigners, I spoke an atonal dialect…
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Can You Learn Mandarin From Outside Chinese Speaking Countries? Yes, Here’s Why
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Ask someone who has never learned a foreign language to fluency what they imagine the best way to do so might be and many will reply: “Go and live in the country.” There is a widespread idea that by living in a country where your target language is spoken you can’t fail to “pick it…
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How Overcoming Chinese Speaking Fears Led to a Life Changing Experience (Podcast)
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(This podcast is available on Spotify and Apple.) A few weeks ago a message appeared on the I’m Learning Mandarin Facebook group addressed to me from a learner called Jake Martin. The message read as follows: “Thank you for accepting me into the group! I just found your podcast and website the other day, and…
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You Don’t Understand Everything In Your Native Language. Stop Trying To Do So In Chinese
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One of my most misguided thought patterns when learning Chinese involved the belief that my ultimate goal must be to understand everything. This was the case at the start when I couldn’t understand anything. But it became even more of a problem through the intermediate plateau as my goals became more ambitious. When I came…
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Why Most Language Proficiency Exams are a Pointless Waste of Your Time
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Recently I tweeted out the following message concerning language exams, generating a fair amount of discussion and agreement among fellow learners. I’ve been reflecting on this issue a lot as I recently completed a semester studying advanced Mandarin at a leading university in Taiwan. In general, I found the course useful. The teacher was supportive…
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Four Ways ChatGPT Can Give Your Chinese a Huge Boost
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Since ChatGPT became publicly available last November it has allegedly grown in popularity at a faster rate than any other online app or service in the history of the internet. The breadth of its appeal is not hard to understand. It can write crisp copy, research topics of interest, suggest birthday party ideas and, if…
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Four Things I’ve Learned From My First Week Living in Taiwan
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Last week I moved to Taiwan to travel and study Chinese for six months. Although I have been to Taipei before, this is my first time doing so as a Mandarin speaker and my first experience of living in a Chinese-speaking country for an extended period. Below are five things I learned from my first…
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