I'm Learning Mandarin

Building an app to achieve native-level Chinese reading skills: Interview with Emmanuel Roche

Apr 17, 2024

Computer scientist Emmanuel Roche shares his 35-year journey learning Chinese, developing Full Chinese app for native-level proficiency. Discusses challenges in Chinese learning, importance of complete sentence understanding, benefits of sentence mining, and bridging academic-community gap for efficient language acquisition.

30:23

Creator website

Episode guests

Emmanuel Roche

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Quick takeaways

Traditional Chinese learning methods in the late 80s were inefficient and lacked effective tools for comprehension and retention.

The Full Chinese app revolutionizes Chinese language acquisition by emphasizing efficiency, self-study, and personalized learning experiences.

Deep dives

Challenges of Learning Chinese in the Late 80s

Learning Chinese in the late 80s involved inefficient teaching methods, reliance on paper dictionaries, and limited resources like audio tapes for pronunciation. Pinion, the system used, was not ideal for foreign learners, posing difficulties in tone comprehension. Despite initial frustrations and high dropout rates among learners, there was a lack of effective tools for sentence understanding and vocabulary retention.

How to Start Learning Chinese

04:51

How to Invert the Classroom

04:00

Introduction

2min

Navigating Chinese Language Challenges

6min

Unlocking Language Learning Through Sentence Mining

6min

Navigating Challenges in Teaching Chinese

13min

Continuous Learning Approach and Mandarin Newsletter Promotion

2min

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.