Matt Vs Japan on Input, Stephen Krashen, Why Accents Matter & Much More (Podcast)
On today’s podcast we have a very special guest, the YouTube superstar and fluent Japanese speaker Matt Vs Japan. Matt is a well known face in the lan...
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Mandarin Reading
Posts on moving from textbook passages to real written Chinese: characters, graded readers, reading apps, novels, and strategies for surviving unknown words.
37 posts
How Many Words do you Really Need to Speak Fluent Chinese?
One of the most frequently asked questions from new Chinese learners is: "how many words will I need to learn before I'm fluent?" In this guest post c...
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Thanks to These Apps Self-Studying Chinese is Much Easier Than Ten Years Ago
It's easy to forget that ten years ago I - and many people around me - didn’t own a smartphone. At that time the most impressive thing I could do on m...
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Christmas Reflections & Ambitious New Year Goals
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 comprehensi...
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Do You REALLY Need to Learn to Write Chinese Characters?
Learning to read and write Chinese characters is one of the most daunting challenges for Mandarin learners. But do you really need to learn to write C...
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Leaning Chinese with Graded Readers (Podcast)
On today’s episode, I discuss a topic I have previously blogged about: graded readers. For those who aren’t familiar, graded readers are books intende...
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Cracking the Intermediate Plateau (Podcast)
The I’m Learning Mandarin Podcast is now available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. As an intermediate Mandarin learner, one of the main challenges I fa...
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Learning Characters with Hack Chinese (Podcast)
One of the most daunting aspects of learning Chinese is the sheer number of characters required for basic literacy. It’s estimated that comfortably re...
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My Mandarin Methods & Resources (Video)
This week I was interviewed by Elle Lebel of the online language learning tool LingQ to discuss my resources and methods for learning Mandarin. The di...
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