The American professor who performed live comedy in Mandarin in front of a billion people

I'm Learning Mandarin

My free Mandarin learning eBook: https://www.peakmandarin.com/free-ebook

David's blogpost, Why Chinese is So Damn Hard: https://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

My blog: imlearningmandarin.com

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My guest today is David Moser, an Associate Professor at Beijing Capital Normal University. He’s had a fascinating and varied career in academia teaching courses in Chinese history and politics and authoring books on Mandarin grammar and the unification of the Chinese language.

There’s so much we could have spoken to David about. But for this interview, we decided to focus two main areas:

The first is his story of self-studying Chinese to fluency. It began in the US in the 1980s and ultimately led to a series of amazing life experiences in Beijing, where he became a national star, performing in front of up to a billion people in live televised comedy sketches.

The second point of focus is a piece David wrote called Why Chinese is So Damn Hard. It’s possibly the most widely read blog post on Chinese learning ever written and also one of the inspirations for me starting my own blog and this podcast.

The blog is a tongue-in-cheek lament on the difficulties and frustrations we all face when we take on the Chinese language. I’ve included a link above.

I hope to have the opportunity to get David back on the podcast to discuss his academic career in future. But for now, I give you, round 1 of my interview with David Moser.