Can a Busy Dad Learn Mandarin in Just One Year?
Over the last 12 months, busy Welsh accountant and father to a young daughter, Lewys Thomas, has been working to improve his Mandarin speaking skills...
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Mandarin Listening
Posts on training your ear for real Mandarin: active listening, ambiguity tolerance, native-speed audio, podcasts, immersion, and choosing input you can actually stick with.
44 posts
Where to start
Best first reads
01 Your Ultimate Guide to Mastering Chinese Listening in Five Steps Of the four core language learning skills - listening, reading, speaking and writing - I've found listening to be the toughest to crack. For long peri... Read 02 Getting Smart about Mandarin Listening I chose this topic because listening is probably one of the areas that frustrates Mandarin learners more than any other. First, I want to talk about t... Read 03 Tolerating Ambiguity: How to Cope With Not Understanding Chinese (Podcast) New language learners often find it difficult to cope with the experience of not understanding. We’re used to being in situations in our native langua... Read
Generate Mandarin Podcasts on any Topic with Mindblowing AI Tool
It’s called Notebook LM, and it’s a website run by Google. Here’s what makes it so powerful: you can feed it any content: websites, text, even audio,...
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Lewys's 6-Month Transformation to Conversational Mandarin (Video)
Over the last six months, Welsh accountant and father Lewys Thomas has been working to improve his Mandarin speaking skills with I'm Learning Mandarin...
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Chris Foley's Mandarin Speaking Diary: My Immersive Trip to China (Month 3)
Chris Foley has set himself a challenge to improve his tone pronunciation, and achieve a standard Mandarin accent in time for his Chinese wedding cere...
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Battle of the Apps: LingQ Premium Vs Duolingo
Over the years I’ve used a number of Mandarin Chinese learning apps with mixed results. Some of them, I credit with playing a significant role in enab...
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Learning Mandarin with Dong Chinese (Podcast)
Dong Chinese is an all-in-one Chinese learning app that enables learners to learn sentences in context using spaced repetition. In the episode, we dis...
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Interview with Karen Cheuk from Happy Mandarin
Karen was born and raised in Hong Kong and went on to study at Cambridge University on a scholarship. After graduating and having a daughter, she was...
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Interview with Michael Campbell from Glossika (Podcast)
Michael has dedicated a significant portion of his life to understanding and mastering languages, having lived in Taiwan for most of his life and beco...
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Chinese TV Shows to Learn Chinese - Netflix
There are literally dozens of Chinese TV shows to learn Chinese on Netflix. And making use of these has had a huge impact on my ability to go from int...
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