Today we interview Reuven Lerner, founder of Mandarin Weekly, a website (and weekly newsletter) that provides you the last news and tools for learning Chinese online.

I discovered Mandarin Weekly years ago, while I was researching new Chinese learning tools for updating our articles on “Free Resources to Learn Chinese Online“. I’m a subscriber since then.

But let’s get started!

About Mandarin Weekly

Reuven, thank you for accepting this interview. Can you tell us something about your background and how you got into Chinese language?

I have been a software consultant with my own business since 1995. Over the last decade, most of my work has been as a trainer, going to high-tech companies and teaching their programmers the tools and technologies that I know well – Python, Git, and data science. (If you don’t know what those are, that’s fine!).

About five years ago, a training company based in China asked me to come and teach some courses at their clients’ offices. The courses went well, and I’ve been traveling to China 3-5 times each year ever since. I mostly go to Beijing and Shanghai, but was fortunate enough to go to Nanjing about two years ago, too.

Before my first trip, I asked several friends what I should expect. Two of them said that I should learn some Chinese. That, of course, sounded like crazy talk – after all, we know that Chinese is impossible to learn, right? The friends told me that the language isn’t so bad, and that learning at least a few words would be useful. [Read more…]

Today we interview Sean McGibney, Chief Marketing Officer of The Chairman’s Bao, a website dedicated to people that want to learn Chinese we discovered the past month.

Sean, thank you for accepting this interview. What is The Chairman’s Bao and in what way is different from the hundreds of websites that focus on Chinese learning?

We set out with one simple aim in creating The Chairman’s Bao (TCB) – to create engaging, informative and interesting levelled content for those who learn Chinese. It offers a great sense of achievement to be able to read news in a target language, but the nature of Chinese makes it extremely difficult for non-native speakers to read newspapers. Add into the mix a gap in intermediate to advanced resources for learning Chinese and TCB was born!

How and when was your online newspaper born?

In reality TCB was a couple of years in the planning but the website launched back in January 2015. It has been a rollercoaster 10 months but one that has also been greatly rewarding for all involved.

Let’s suppose I’m studying Chinese and I end up on your website for the first time. How can I make the most of it?

We start writing articles at HSK 3, so ideally users will already have a solid knowledge of beginner’s Chinese. Upon signing up to the website, you not only have access to our full back catalogue of articles, but also a whole host of interactive features such as a live dictionary that scrolls as you read, intelligent flashcard system, audio for every article, and much more.

Everybody finds the study style that best suits them and the site is easily adaptable to individual or group learning. In essence, sign up to the website, ensure you try out all of the features and find out what works best for you! [Read more…]

After almost a year we come back with our interviews to the superstars of Mandarin language, that this those people that not only are studying Mandarin but, through the internet, contribute to the always growing community of Chinese learners with their own wisdom.

Today we’ll talk with Olle Linge, a 30 years old Swedish guy that spent the last seven years learning Chinese (and how to teach it). Olle is the founder & soul of Hacking Chinese, one of my favorite website that focus on Chinese learning. But, as usual, we aren’t going to talk about how to learn Chinese…

Introducing Hacking Chinese

Olle, Hacking Chinese isn’t a simple blog. Sure, the foundation of the website are your articles. However what impresses me the most is the community of people you built: the ones that comment on your articles, the ones that discuss or ask you for advice on Twitter or, why not, the ones that participate to the challenges you propose. When did you start Hacking Chinese and why? What was your initial goal? [Read more…]

I have been thinking for a long time on the topic of my first article about Chinese learning. Finally I decided to make an interview to one of the first Chinese people I meet in Beijing. I’m talking about Luna, a Chinese language and culture teacher.

She has taught mandarin in several schools, including the Ecuador’s Confucius Institute of Quito and Guayaquil. She has also collaborated with the European Science and Technology Fellowship Programme, which brought 58 European researchers to China during the period 2009-2012, and contributed on the elaboration of some HSK exams.

At the moment she is working as a teacher at the Beijing Film Academy, teaching an unconventional Chinese course that exploits Chinese movies to learn the Chinese language and culture. [Read more…]

World is small. And the internet is even smaller.

In early February I joined the Hacking Chinese Characters Challenge.

One of the rules decided by the guy that proposed the challenge, Olle Linge from Hacking Chinese (check it, it’s one of the best resources out there to learn Chinese), was that we had to connect via email with the two people that joined the challenge before and after us.

This is how I got in touch with Julien Leyre who, after we introduced ourselves and our goals with Chinese language, followed up with this email: [Read more…]