Immersion Vs Structured Learning (Podcast)

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How this Deaf Mandarin Learner Perfected Chinese Tones – I'm Learning Mandarin

My Free Mandarin Learning eBook: https://www.peakmandarin.com/free-ebook My Chinese learning Blog: imlearningmandarin.com James's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jameswonglife James's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JamesWongLife/videos — On today’s podcast, I speak to James Wong, a commercial model and influencer from the UK who has an incredible story of overcoming adversity to become fluent in Chinese. James’ dad is from Hong Kong but moved to the UK as a child. James was raised monolingual in English but as an adult decided to explore his heritage by taking on Chinese languages. He moved to Taiwan to study Mandarin a few years ago and has lived there ever since. His Chinese learning journey would eventually see him reach a high level in spoken Mandarin, master the tones, and even take part in several televised interviews in Taiwan. These achievements were made all the more remarkable by the fact that James has severe hearing loss. I began by asking James about his mixed heritage background and early exposure to Chinese language and culture growing up.

Anyone who studies a language has to combine a mixture of approaches that broadly fall into two categories: naturalistic and structured. Naturalistic approaches involve learning through immersion in the target language environment, reading books, watching TV and having conversations. Structured approaches involve focused and deliberate study, such as learning grammar rules, memorising vocabulary, and repetition drills.

Traditionally, highly structured approaches were favoured in classroom environments. But it’s fair to say today’s online language learning community has waged war on this idea. Language should be all about fun, and enjoying yourself. The influential linguist Stephen Krashen argues that the most effective way to acquire a language is to expose yourself to content that you can comprehend and immerse yourself in activities that you enjoy. The more time you spend doing this, the more you will gradually progress closer and closer to fluency.

I have been heavily influenced by these ideas and I think I’ve benefited from them immensely. It was largely through immersing myself in the content I enjoyed that, despite not living in China, I was able to self-study to a level where I could comfortably engage in meaningful conversations with native Chinese speakers. But, I have also learned from experience that relying too heavily on immersion alone when studying Chinese has its limits. This is particularly the case when it comes to tones and characters, two aspects of Chinese that many learners find hard to master.

So in the latest I’m Learning Mandarin podcast I discussed these issues with a friend of the blog, Lionel Rowe. Lionel speaks fluent Chinese which he acquired while living in Beijing for seven years. His learning methods were much more structured than mine, particularly at the beginning, so I thought it would be interesting to discuss our different language learning experiences with him.

You can listen to the full podcast below or on Anchor.

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