Ground Zero to Confident Pronunciation: A Working Mother's First 6 Months Learning Chinese

Nov 13, 2025

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Read a blog by Lewys, the student I interviewed in Mandarin on the last episode, about his journey to conversational Mandarin in 12 months here: https://imlearningmandarin.com/2025/03/12/lewyss-6-month-transformation-to-conversational-mandarin-video/

Learn more about my coaching programme here: https://imlearningmandarin.com/gym

So, over the past six months, I've been coaching Katharine, a busy working mom from Wales who wanted to learn Chinese to connect with her friends and help her son with his Chinese homework.

And unlike most people who come to me for coaching, Catherine was starting from ground zero. She tried Duolingo for around a week, but quickly realized that she needed a more systematic approach that would actually enable her to reach her goals.

So, Katharine has a demanding career. She's raising a family and she lives in the UK. Hey, so moving to China or dedicating full days to study isn't really an option. And so we set a very specific goal for her first 6 months, which was to establish a rock-solid foundation when it came to pronunciation, tones, and sentence structure.

So that meant rather than cramming thousands of random words from HSK lists, focusing on the words that she needed to use herself to talk about, the things that she was interested and wanted to talk about, and making sure she could say those things really well.

So making sure that her pronunciation and tones were really good for the things that she wanted to say. And so that's what she's done for the first 6 months, collecting phrases that she actually wants to say and building her own kind of personalized immersion environment where she's immersing in those things that she wants to talk about all the time while walking the dog, commuting to meetings, etc.

So, in a moment, we're going to hear a clip of Katherine reading a script that she wrote about whales, entirely in Chinese with excellent tones.

And after you hear that clip, I interview Katherine in English about her experience over her first 6 months of learning Chinese. So, now let's listen to Katherine in Chinese on the topic of Wales, where she's from.