5 Great Reasons to Learn Mandarin – Learning Chinese

Our Mandarin Monday interview for this week is none other than well-known blogger, podcast host and translator, Brendan O'Kane. One of the original founders of Paper Republic, Brendan is a host of the Mandarin Chinese language learning podcast Popup Chinese, and teaches a course in Chinese-English literary translation at IES Abroad Beijing.

What follows is the second in our weekly Mandarin Monday series, that discusses Chinese learning. The series delivers advice through interviews with long-time Mandarin learners, sharing resources and discussing learning techniques. This week we speak to Kellen Parker, co-founder of Sinoglot.

I back-translated the Chinese version of this cute, funny story with great illustrations as a language learning exercise. You can test your reading ability with the image files or read along in English or pinyin with the pdf cheatsheet.

John at Sinosplice shares some great insight into the difficulties of learning a language and the personality-castration it tends to bring with it. "Someone who is always the life of the party may have a really hard time being that guy that’s hard to understand and that doesn’t make much sense.