Regular blogs with insights and tips based on my experience of learning Chinese
*This podcast is also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Anchor, Pocket Casts and Breaker. Please subscribe on your favoured podcast provider and leave a review. On today’s podcast we discuss…
Recently I watched a YouTube video (see below) titled “How I Mastered Chinese in 6 Months.” The video has done pretty well – as videos with enticing titles often do…
Reflecting on my progress over the past year I am left with a strange feeling. On the one hand I believe my spoken proficiency, listening comprehension and character recognition have…
Update, 17/12/2021: The winner of the raffle has been announced as Søren Friis Hansen, from Denmark! Congratulations Søren and thank you to everyone who took part! — I’ve previously written…
Recently one of my Tweets sparked a lively discussion among Mandarin learners, teachers and the wider language learning community. I recalled an encounter with a beginner Mandarin learner who told…
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…
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,…
Anyone who studies a language has to combine a mixture of approaches which broadly fall into two categories: naturalistic and structured. Naturalistic approaches involve learning through immersion in the target…
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