I'm Learning Mandarin

Links: Peak Mandarin Discord Server: https://discord.gg/b9PAyKwT9p Your ultimate guide to Mastering Chinese tones -- In this episode, we’re diving into one of the most challenging parts of learning Mandarin: mastering tricky tone pairs. I’ll walk you through four of the most commonly mispronounced tone combinations and explain how to get them right.

In this episode, we bring you the recording of our October 20th session where we tackled questions on how to fix your tones. If you're looking to improve your tones but aren't sure how, this discussion is packed with insights from me, as well as server moderator, Jered. Tune in to hear valuable tips, expert advice, and answers to your questions from the live audience. Perfect for anyone looking to level up their tones! Interested in joining more live sessions like this? Join our Discord server on this link: https://discord.gg/b9PAyKwT9p

Links: Peak Mandarin Discord Server: https://discord.gg/b9PAyKwT9p -- In this episode, I dive into one of the most common questions Mandarin learners face: Do you really need to memorise the tones for every new word? Drawing from my personal journey of learning Mandarin and my experiences coaching other learners on my Pronunciation Academy, I discuss the challenges many learners encounter with tone memorisation. I’ll share tips on memorising tones and learning to produce them accurately.

Links: Peak Mandarin Discord: https://discord.gg/b9PAyKwT9p -- In a recent episode, we announced the launch of our Peak Mandarin Discord Server. In just over a week we’ve seen the server grow into a thriving hub with nearly 200 learners supporting each other to ace their Mandarin-speaking goals. And in today’s episode you’ll hear our first-ever live Q&A hosted in the server last Sunday, covering how to practice speaking at an early stage of your learning. Joining me on the q&a panel were Peak Mandarin server moderators, Jered and Lewys, who’ve each been leaning Mandarin for around two years and focussed heavily on speaking during that time. We had some great questions covering how to find opportunities to speak and get feedback from native speakers early on, in a way that’s effective and stress-free.

Links: Peak Mandarin Discord server: https://discord.gg/BtT6t7fK Interview with Karen Chung: https://imlearningmandarin.com/2022/06/26/how-to-achieve-a-near-native-chinese-accent-with-professor-karen-chung-podcast/ My free Mandarin learning eBook: https://www.peakmandarin.com/free-ebook -- Recently a member of our Peak Mandarin Discord server posted a short clip of a native Mandarin speaker saying a sentence in mid-conversation at full-blown speed. The sentence was: 这么复杂的东西怎么学得会啊不可能的嘛对吧。Zhème fùzá de dōngxī zěnme xué de huì a bù kěnéng de ma duì ba. Something this complicated, how could I possibly learn it? It's impossible, right? The challenge was laid out for members of the server to mimic the sentence and post their attempts on the thread to receive feedback from other learners. So I decided to deploy the methods I often use to mimic native speech and give it a go. In this episode I’m going to break down step by step how I went from struggling to keep up to being able to deliver the sentence with natural rhythm and accurate tones at lightning speed. A word of caution, this sentence was particularly challenging, so if you don’t have much experience mimicking Mandarin, it’s advisable to start with something shorter and much slower.

Links: My free Mandarin learning eBook: https://www.peakmandarin.com/free-ebook Our Peak Mandarin Discord Server: https://discord.gg/b9PAyKwT9p Joshua's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@jlykes -- On today’s episode, I interview Joshua Lykes, an up-and-coming YouTuber whose recent videos on learning Chinese have been creating waves in the community. Joshua recently posted an hour-long video documenting in detail his first year of Mandarin learning. And one of the things that stood out to me about that video Joshua’s use of technology, much of which wasn’t available to me when I first started learning Chinese. It strikes me that in the last year or two, the sudden exposition of AI has had a tremendously deep impact on how we learn Chinese and that’s only going to increase going forward. So after meeting Joshua on our Peak Mandarin Discord server and learning about his journey, I decided to get him on the podcast to chat about his experiences using AI to learn Chinese, as well as his hopes for the future of technology and language learning.

Link to Discord Server: https://discord.gg/gvWFSDbj -- One thing I’ve found that’s often missing for a lot of learners is this sense of community, of belonging to a network of other learners who share similar goals and can support each other. This is something I try and provide here through my blog. But I’d like to expand this further. So today, we’re announcing the launch of our Peak Mandarin Discord community, a space where Mandarin learners can hang out, share tips and learning experiences and support each other to achieve our goals. To join the community you can click this link. If you don’t already have a Discord account you’ll be prompted to create one and then join the Peak Mandarin server. Once in the server feel free to write a post introducing yourself to the community, share your experiences and get involved in discussions. To explain more about why we’re creating this online community and what we hope to achieve through it I sat down to chat with three of our community moderators, Lewys, Jered and Philipp.

Links: My free Mandarin learning eBook: https://www.peakmandarin.com/free-ebook My blog: imlearningmandarin.com In my first few years of learning Chinese, there were many occasions when I’d suddenly be made aware of a huge flaw in my Chinese I had previously been blind to. This might take the form of a direct comment from a native speaker who is less polite than normal. Or it might be an embarrassing failed attempt to communicate in Mandarin. These moments can be pivotal in shaping our learning experience for better or worse. Recently I was talking about this to one of my students, Lewys, who I’ve previously interviewed on this podcast. Lewys has experienced plenty of what he calls – ‘wet fish moments’ some of which affected his confidence and even caused him to give up. So in this episode, we share our experiences of having our egos crushed in the process of learning Mandarin and offer our tips for other learners on how best to avoid similar experiences.

Links: Get 20% off first month of Mandarin Mosaic: https://mandarinmosaic.com/imlearningmandarin Karl's blog on ChatGPT: http://imlearningmandarin.com/2024/05/19/does-chatgpt-speak-authentic-chinese-the-results-of-my-study-may-surprise-you/ -- My guest on this week’s episode is an app designer who has made several appearances here in the past. Karl Baker, recently launched his new Mandarin learning app, Mandarin Mosaic. The App seeks to make sentence mining accessible. Like Anki, but easier to use and And if you’re interested in trying it out, you can go go mandarinmosaic.com/imlearningmandarin to get 20% off your first month. I caught up with Karl and began by asking him all about his new launch, as well as his plans for the future.

Links: Peak Mandarin Newsletter: https://www.peakmandarin.com/free-ebook My blog reflecting on the summer camp experience: http://imlearningmandarin.com/2024/08/04/5-things-i-learned-from-5-days-of-total-mandarin-immersion/ Will's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@willhartmandarin/videos -- Last week I attended a five-day immersive Mandarin Retreat Summer Camp as a lead organiser. A group of 14 of us, including learners, organisers volunteers, and native tutors got together in Cheddar, in the south-west of England, and spoke nothing but Chinese for five days straight. While it’s all still fresh in my mind, I decided to get my colleague and co-founder of Peak Mandarin, Will Hart, to chat about the experience. Will also attended the retreat as an organiser and in this episode, we chat about what the experience of deep immersion was like and how we plan to make these camps bigger and better in the future.