I'm Learning Mandarin

My free Mandarin learning eBook: https://www.peakmandarin.com/free-ebook

David's blogpost, Why Chinese is So Damn Hard: https://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

My blog: imlearningmandarin.com

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My guest today is David Moser, an Associate Professor at Beijing Capital Normal University. 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 unification of the Chinese language.

There’s so much we could have spoken to David about. But for this interview, we decided to focus two main areas:

The first is his story of self-studying Chinese to fluency. It began in the US in the 1980s and ultimately led to a series of amazing life experiences in Beijing, where he became a national star, performing in front of up to a billion people in live televised comedy sketches.

The second point of focus is a piece David wrote called Why Chinese is So Damn Hard. It’s possibly the most widely read blog post on Chinese learning ever written and also one of the inspirations for me starting my own blog and this podcast.

The blog is a tongue-in-cheek lament on the difficulties and frustrations we all face when we take on the Chinese language. I’ve included a link above.

I hope to have the opportunity to get David back on the podcast to discuss his academic career in future. But for now, I give you, round 1 of my interview with David Moser.

My free Mandarin learning eBook: https://www.peakmandarin.com/free-ebook

Transcript: imlearningmandarin.com

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In today’s episode, I tell a story in Chinese about bullying and language learning based on personal experience.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ll be posting these shorter Chinese episodes every two weeks, in between the longer interviews with Mandarin scholars, learners, and experts.

One of the things I’ve found is that setting yourself a goal to record and post podcasts speaking Chinese is a brilliant way to improve your speaking skills. When you know other people are going to hear your recording it pushes you to work harder on your delivery!

So that’s why I’ve decided to open up the podcast to listeners who are interested in recording and producing your own short monologues in Chinese.

If you’re at an intermediate to advanced level and would like to have a go at recording an episode in Chinese please get in touch by emailing info[at]peakmandarin[dot]com.

You’ll be supported through the process of developing your idea as well as recording and producing an episode in Chinese to be published on I’m Learning Mandarin.

Finally, before you listen to the podcast, I recommend installing the browser plugin Zhongwen Chinese-English Dictionary (available on Firefox and Chrome) so you can look up any characters or words you don’t know by hovering over them.

Now on to the episode!

My eBook: https://www.peakmandarin.com/free-ebook

Emmanuel's Full Chinese app: https://www.fullchinese.com/

My blog: imlearningmandarin.com

My guest on today’s podcast is computer scientist and educational technologist, Emmanuel Roche.

Emmanuel has more than 35 years of experience learning Chinese. He began his Mandarin odyssey in the late 80s, studying the language at university. But he quickly became frustrated at how inefficient teaching and learning methods were at the time.

Most of his classmates gave up, but Emmanuel didn’t. Instead, he developed a lifelong passion for Chinese, using his background in computer science to create technological solutions to make Mandarin acquisition a more efficient process.

In recent years he’s created an app called Full Chinese, which helps learners reach native-level proficiency in Chinese reading. It’s used by learners around the world and has even been integrated into Chinese Studies classrooms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

I chatted to Emmanuel about his challenges learning Chinese, the story behind his Full Chinese app and why he’s trying to bridge a divide between academic linguists and language learners.

Peak Mandarin Newsletter: https://www.peakmandarin.com/free-ebook

Transcript and translation: imlearningmandarin.com

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 interviews and discussions about learning Mandarin once a fortnight. Then, in between each interview, I’ll post shorter episodes in which I speak in Mandarin about a topic.

Today’s episode is the first one in the series of these Chinese monologues. In it, I speak about my experiences living in Taiwan last year and offer three things all learners should know before going to Taiwan to study Chinese.

Peak Mandarin Newsletter: https://www.peakmandarin.com/free-ebook

Isaac's Mandarin from the Ground Up podcast: https://www.mftgu.com/

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On today’s podcast, I speak to language teacher and podcast host, Isaac Myers.

Isaac has a fascinating Mandarin learning backstory which involves extensive travel around Taiwan and China and working at Google training language models for speech recognition systems.

Through his podcast, Mandarin from the Ground Up, he teaches Chinese using the same imitation techniques we all used to learn our first language.

All of which gives him a unique perspective and makes his insights on learning Chinese well worth listening to!

Get the full eBook for free here: https://www.peakmandarin.com/free-ebook

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One of the questions I've always been fascinated by and covered extensively on my podcast is: what do the most successful Chinese learners do differently from everyone else?

Is their success purely down to talent or is there method behind the genius?
My new eBook, Lessons from a Chinese Learning Phenomenon looks at this question through the case of Will Hart, a young British medical student who achieved what many linguists thought impossible.

During lockdown, he reached a near-native level of spoken Mandarin within just 1.5 years.
I got to know Will after watching him being interviewed in flawless Chinese on YouTube in 2022. I then interviewed him on this podcast and went on to collaborate with him on our series of Masterclasses, teaching intermediate students how to overcome specific obstacles on the journey to Chinese fluency.
Based on extensive interviews and many hours spent in his company, I reveal exactly how he managed to reach such a high level so quickly. I also explain how, after years of failure, I put his methods into practice to become proficient in Chinese myself.
And how you can too!
The book comes with a foreword written by world-leading linguist and elite Mandarin speaker Professor Karen Chung of National Taiwan University. And in today's episode, Karen reads out the foreword in her own voice.

Links:

Peak Mandarin Masterclasses: https://www.peakmandarin.com/masterclass

Tones Masterclass: https://www.peakmandarin.com/challenge-page/tones

On today’s episode, I interview a friend of the podcast, Ryan, and announce the launch of my new Mandarin learning platform, Peak Mandarin.

Over the past year, I’ve been working with YouTuber Will Hart, to run a series of live Mandarin Masterclasses teaching you how to overcome specific challenges on your journey to Mandarin fluency.

These live sessions proved popular. So we decided to develop them into a series of step-by-step online programs that you can complete at your own convenience.

Each of our Masterclasses contains video, text, and image presentations in English, along with native Chinese audio clips.

We’ve got one on how to nail tones, another one on how to go about sentence mining as well as a Masterclass on how to train yourself to think like a native Chinese speaker.

Plus we’ve also created two new mini-Masterclasses, teaching you how to make perfect Anki flashcards and how to overcome fossilised pronunciation mistakes.

We’re currently running a limited launch offer giving you 20% off when you buy our Peak Mandarin Masterpack containing all five Masterclasses.

And if you’re not satisfied with your purchase we have a 30-day money-back guarantee on any Peak Mandarin product, so you can rest assured your purchase is completely risk-free.

Interested? Go to https://www.peakmandarin.com/masterclass to get your Masterclass or click the link in the description below!

Back to today’s podcast guest.

Ryan is a language teacher and Mandarin learner who’s made a couple of appearances on the podcast in the past. I first met him three years ago when he attended one of my language exchange sessions.

At the time. Ryan was adamant that he was tone-deaf and incapable of even perceiving Mandarin tones, much less producing them himself.

But thanks to patience, dedication and a little help from his friends, Ryan has now largely overcome his tone issues and is well on his way to becoming a confident Mandarin speaker.

In this episode, we catch up on his Chinese learning journey and discuss how I helped him go from thinking he was tone-deaf to having no problems producing tones accurately in natural speech.

Links:

My blog: https://imlearningmandarin.com/

Sara's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@sarajaaksola

On today’s episode, I speak to Sara Jaaksola, A Ph.D. researcher and Chinese teacher originally from Finland

Sara first moved to China in 2010 to study Mandarin, before deciding to settle there long-term.

After working as a Chinese teacher for several years, she recently embarked on A Ph.D. program, researching Mandarin learners’ motivations for studying the language.

Sara has loads of interesting insights from living, studying, and teaching in China for over ten years, as well as some great tips on staying motivated throughout the learning process that we can all learn from!

Link:

Duncan's app: https://www.artilanguages.com/

My blog: imlearningmandarin.com

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If you google “what’s the best way to learn a language”, you’ll be bombarded with hundreds of different methods, each claiming to be completely original and groundbreaking.

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, hundreds or even thousands of years ago.

That’s according to my guest today, Duncan Parrish.

Duncan is an educational technologist with a keen interest in history. As a developer working on an innovative Chinese learning app, he took the unusual step of looking to the past for inspiration.

In this episode, we discuss the rich history of language learning, from the Romans through the Jesuit missionaries in China right up to the emergence of the internet at the end of the 20th century.

So how did people learn languages in times gone by? How did technological advances impact language learning? And what lessons can we take from our ancestors to improve the way we learn languages today?

Listen on to find out.

Links:

My blog: imlearningmandarin.com

My Facebook community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/imlearningmandarin

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Most of my guests on this podcast have had experience and success in either learning Chinese, teaching Chinese or researching Chinese. Occasionally, I have the pleasure of interviewing people with experience of all three, my recent episode with Olle Linge being a perfect example. And today I have the pleasure of interviewing another such guest. Rob Neal from the UK works for the Swire Chinese Language Foundation, an organisation that funds the teaching of Chinese in British state schools. He has over 20 years of experience engaging with the Chinese language and recently completed his PHD at the University of Cambridge. His thesis asked a question that many learners and teachers have wondered about: how important is it for Mandarin learners to get the tones right? And his findings may surprise you.