The History of Chinese Attitudes Towards Mandarin Speaking Foreigners (Podcast)
Two weeks ago I announced my plans to open up the I'm Learning Mandarin podcast to you, offering you the chance to record your own podcast episodes in...
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The Fluency Simulator: Why You Should Get Into Intensive Listening (Again and Again)
Duncan Parrish is an I'm Learning Mandarin contributor and coordinator of Arti Languages, a project using mobile games and cognitive science to enhanc...
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The American Professor Who Performed Live Mandarin Comedy in Front of a Billion People (podcast)
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...
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Four Ways to Bridge the Gap From Textbooks to Native Chinese Reading Material
If you’ve memorised the most common 500 to 1000 Mandarin words you might find yourself in an awkward position. You can understand most of what’s writt...
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This Bully Nearly Made Me Give Up Chinese! (Podcast)
As usual, you can read the Chinese transcript below with the English translation underneath. As I've mentioned previously, I'll be posting these short...
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Building an App to Achieve Native Chinese Reading Skills (Podcast)
Emmanuel has more than 35 years of experience learning Chinese. He began his Mandarin odyssey in the late 80s, studying the language at university. Ho...
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Three Things You Need To Know Before You Study Chinese in Taiwan (Podcast)
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...
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This Fluent Mandarin Speaker Worked for Google on Speech Recognition Systems (podcast)
Isaac has a fascinating Mandarin learning backstory which involves extensive travel around Taiwan and China and working at Google training language mo...
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What is Micro-Fluency and Why Should You Aim for It?
Duncan Parrish is an educational technologist and coordinator of Arti Languages, a project using mobile games and cognitive science to enhance how we...
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How to Stay Motivated When Learning Chinese (Podcast)
D. researcher and Chinese teacher originally from Finland Sara first moved to China in 2010 to study Mandarin, before deciding to settle there long-te...
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Why Memorising Chinese HSK Vocab Lists is a Bad Idea
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....
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How did people learn languages in centuries gone by? (Podcast)
But if we study history, we’ll discover many of these modern approaches are actually very similar to the ways our ancestors learned foreign languages,...
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Does Your Chinese Teacher Meet These Five Essential Requirements?
Chinese teachers are everywhere. There are thousands upon thousands of them. They can be found on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Italki… Anywhe...
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How Much do Chinese Tones Actually Matter? Interview with Rob Neal (podcast)
Occasionally though, I have the pleasure of interviewing people with experience of all three - my recent episode with Olle Linge being a perfect examp...
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The Ultimate Chinese Learning Adventure (Podcast)
Today’s podcast episode is all about Carolina Navarro, a language educator from Spain whose Chinese learning adventures saw her overcome numerous cult...
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There Isn’t a Shred of Evidence That Speaking Early is Harmful for Your Chinese
“When should you start speaking Chinese?” This is the question at the centre of one of the longest standing debates in the language learning community...
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Interview with Hacking Chinese Founder Olle Linge (Podcast)
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 and...
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Reflecting on 2023 in Taiwan & Plans for 2024!
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! A...
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Can You Really Be Understood If You Ignore Chinese Tones?
Recently I came across an interesting research paper investigating the popular claim that native speakers can still understand Mandarin learners who i...
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Fewer Students are Taking Chinese at University. But Online Self Directed Learning is Booming!
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 t...
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Chinese Grammar Isn't As Simple As You Think!
I’ve often heard learners and teachers alike say Mandarin grammar is ‘simple.’ Unlike European languages, they point out that there are no genders, ve...
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My Photo Diary from Five Days Speaking Only Chinese on Mandarin Retreat Summer Camp
In this guest post, blogger and Mandarin Retreat volunteer Lingo Geek publishes his photo diary from five days spent speaking only Chinese on a recent...
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Catch-up with Will Hart: Nailing Sentence Structure & Visiting China for the First Time (Podcast)
By now, listeners to this podcast will be familiar with Will Hart, the Mandarin learning phenomenon who became incredibly fluent in Chinese within the...
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Five Ways I’ve Changed My Mind About Learning Chinese
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 lan...
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