Cracking the Intermediate Plateau (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.

*The I’m Learning Mandarin Podcast is now available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

As an intermediate Mandarin learner, one of the main challenges I face is acquiring lower-frequency words. In any language, the most frequent few thousand words account for over 90% of words used in daily conversation. Mandarin is no different and, although I typically understand the vast majority of words in a sentence, it’s those rarer words that can throw me off. 

So how can we overcome the intermediate plateau and learn enough low-frequency words to become proficient? 

That’s where today’s guest Andrew Methven comes in. Andrew first started learning Chinese whilst on a backpacking trip in China in 2002-03. He eventually went on to train as a translator and interpreter, before joining a startup in the UK focussed on China. More recently, he started the newsletter: https://slowchinese.substack.com designed to help intermediate and advanced learners fill in key gaps in the vocabulary. 

Every week Andrew shares new words, phrases, idioms, colloquialisms, and slang to help readers maintain and improve their Chinese while staying up to date with the latest language trends. Andrew’s experiences of backpacking through China as well as his insights into overcoming the long intermediate plateau are fascinating and insightful. 

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