Send us a text My spoken Chinese was getting more and more ‘fluent’, in that I could have uninterrupted conversations in real life, using my online conversation lessons with teachers to iron out any issues in my pronunciation and expression. All of a sudden, Chinese just ‘clicked’. I could watch a video and would suddenly understand everything that…

Send us a text This episode is about me, finally, finding teachers to Chinese. At first I was learning in a vacuum at home, building confidence in understanding the language, but now that I had taken the plunge and had started to speak to others, I wanted to work on my conversation skills, because… well, they needed quite a lot of work. Working wit…

Send us a text In this episode I’m finally taking the plunge, looking for more speakers of Chinese to talk to. I’m considering tandem language exchange programmes and finding Chinese friends, eventually finding a group dedicated to learners and speakers of Chinese in my town. Joining the group was fun, especially just relaxing and chatting away in …

Send us a text Would I ever be able to speak Chinese fluently, and what would that mean? I had reached a stage where I was starting to speak more coherently, but on some days it felt like I was not able to speak at all. Crucially, my speaking lagged well behind my understanding and I would often have to stop to search for words when speaking. What …

Send us a text In this episode I explain how I initially learnt and revised vocabulary, and how I prepared for the next stage of my learning journey: speaking for real. Well, I had a number of attempts at trying to speak for real and not really succeeding at first. Eventually, I decided to speak Chinese to my ever-so-patient cat and tried out AI pr…

Send us a text In this episode I explore how I honed my different Chinese language skills: understanding, speaking, reading and writing. I look at all those wonderful tools, most of which are free, that are available to the intermediate learner. In my own learning, Chinese podcasts for learners, as well as Chinese television dramas started to play …

Send us a text In this episode I'm looking at language tests and certificates. Would that be a goal for me, and which test should I aim for? Would preparing for a test really motivate me? I try to find ways to make my language learning at the intermediate stage fun and greatly motivating. Looking at implicit and explicit learning, I investigate the…

Send us a text How do you even write Chinese text messages when you don't have a keyboard with 5000 or more characters? In this episode I look at ways in which Chinese is used today, and at some of the changes to the written language within the last 100 years. Is the traditional Chinese writing system really more beautiful than the simplified syste…

Send us a text In this episode I'm looking at the history of the Chinese writing system and why it is so successful that it is still used today. In my own learning, once I knew enough characters and had built up a basic understanding of how the system worked, I was suddenly able to decipher the words (and characters) I came across for the first tim…

Send us a text Chinese has many homophones: words that sound the same. And when you are only just entering the intermediate stage and are still not very confident when it comes to the different 'tones', there are even more such homophones. What can the learner do to make sense of the chaos? And, what even is a word in Chinese? Support the show…

Send us a text In this episode I describe how learning Chinese became my treasured escape from reality. I wanted to tell everyone about my new language and also start speaking Chinese with real people, but I was still not very proficient, despite my efforts. Also, I was reluctant to use the language in a professional setting, reflecting on my exper…

Send us a text When I realised that learning to read and write Chinese characters would help me in my learning, I started to add a writing app to my repertoire of learning methods. Suddenly the characters started to make sense and I saw a pattern behind the apparent randomness. Aside from writing, I also started to hone my listening and speaking sk…

Send us a text Do people really have different learning preferences, and how do you go about finding yours? In this episode I reflect on my language learning back at school, which, mildly put, was a disaster. Not only did my English teacher state that I had no 'talent' for languages, but languages were also my least favourite subject, which was ref…

Send us a text I look at how Chinese is different from the other languages I speak, and how I was dealing with this difficulty. Also, after the first few weeks of learning Chinese, I noticed that I was missing something and that I was getting quite confused at times. Would I be able to keep up my motivation for learning? What would it take? Support…

Send us a text Children learn their first language without looking up any grammar rules, so why can't adults do the same? In this episode look at how the grammars of the world's languages differ. Having previously worked on "grammar" and even written a grammatical description of an Amazonian language, Mosetén, I decided to study Chinese without lea…

Send us a text Once I had decided to learn Chinese, I needed to find the right method to do so. In this episode I describe my thought-process and why started with an app that was entirely in Chinese, without any translation. Support the showBy Jeanette Sakel

Send us a text In this episode I look at what the term 'Chinese' refers to. Mandarin? Cantonese? Why are there so many different terms for Chinese in Chinese itself? I try to investigate whether Chinese is difficult to learn. Well, apparently it is, because everyone keeps telling me so! But is it really? Is my learning doomed right from the start? …

Send us a text Would a 49-year-old even be able to learn a new language? Spoiler alter: yes! But why are people different in their language-learning success? What affects language learning? In this episode I compare how children learn their first language and second language acquisition and I look at the different factors behind language-learning s…

Send us a text Hi, I’m Jeanette Sakel and I’m a professor of Language and Linguistics. I’m an avid language learner... or at least used to be, until I settled into a permanent teaching post, had a kid and somehow did not have the time or inclination to learn languages for a number of years. But this changed about a year and a half ago, when, pretty…