Shanley’s Mandarin journey began at 14, when her family moved from Pennsylvania to Taiwan for four months. The experience stayed with her, even after a long break from studying.

Now she is back in Mandarin with a much clearer purpose: preparing for Taiwan, improving her grammar, studying traditional characters, watching Taiwanese dramas, and working towards the possibility of a Mandarin-speaking master’s programme.

In this episode, Shanley talks about why Taiwan remains her biggest motivation, how she studies grammar, why dramas help with listening and tone, and why sometimes the best reason to learn a language is simply wanting to go back.

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In this episode of The Learner Journals, Tom speaks with Emma, a chemotherapy nurse from Suffolk, Mandarin learner, Mandibu winner, mother, musician, language journal keeper, and professional waffle merchant.

Emma’s reason for learning Mandarin is deeply personal. She and her best friend Angie used to dream about travelling, but Emma’s anxiety meant she often avoided speaking in other countries. When Angie became ill with cancer, their conversations changed from where they would travel together to where Emma would go one day. Before Angie passed away, she made Emma promise to face that fear and stop letting anxiety decide the size of her world.

At first, Emma tried German, then Korean, then eventually Mandarin after a Chinese patient came into her department. Bit theatrical from the universe, but fair enough.

Her first year of learning was heavy on textbooks, lists, coloured pens, GCSE books, Pinyin, translation, and dramas. Her reading and character recognition improved, but speaking barely happened. Her lessons were almost entirely in Mandarin, with no English allowed, which made her anxiety worse. She started avoiding lessons. Not because she disliked Mandarin, but because the method didn’t fit her.

Everything shifted when she found Mandarin Monkey. The Chinglish podcast gave her something she could actually understand. Then came lessons with Ula, Hangouts, Mandibu, Mandarin in the house, journaling, phonics practice, and more speaking. Her learning went from roughly a few hours a week to at least an hour a day, not including the dramas she still very much enjoys because apparently Chinese dramas are a gateway drug.

Emma now keeps two journals. One is for Mandarin practice, including Pinyin, characters, English, and diary-style sentences. The other tracks how she learns: what she did that week, what worked, what didn’t, what words stuck, and why. It’s less “study plan” and more “forensic investigation into my own brain.”

Her strongest learning method is creating little stories around words. Lists don’t work for her. Sentences do. If she learns a word like “supermarket,” she puts it into a small life-based scene, often mixing English and Mandarin until it sticks. She also uses flashcards for sounds, Purple Culture for phonics, Drops for daily vocab, and repetition around real life: work, kids, swimming, daily routines, the stuff she actually says.

A big theme is finding the route around the wall rather than smashing straight into it. Emma doesn’t pretend speaking is easy. Hangouts still make her nervous. But she watches others improve and sees the path. Her dream is to come to London, go to Chinatown with other UK Mandarin learners, watch them order in Mandarin, and think: “That will be me one day.”

Her advice to beginners is simple: ignore people who ask “why Mandarin?” The better question is “why not?” Find a teacher who fits, expect some language exchanges to fizzle, don’t let one bad method convince you the whole language is impossible, and when something isn’t working, change it.

The heart of the episode is this: learning Mandarin is not just about vocabulary for Emma. It’s about headspace. It’s about keeping a promise. It’s about anxiety still being there, but not being allowed to drive anymore.

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In this episode of The Learner Journals, Tom speaks with Ragnar, an Icelandic programmer and entrepreneur learning Mandarin as a long-term personal challenge.

Ragnar’s first language is Icelandic, but his English is so natural that Tom immediately derails into asking how people from Iceland and Scandinavia get so good at it. Ragnar explains that English is everywhere: TV, subtitles, computers, phones, YouTube, school, and daily life. Less “sit down and memorise this grammar table,” more “English has entered the house and is now raising your children.”

His Mandarin story began in 2017 almost as a joke. In Icelandic, people compare difficult things to Chinese, so Ragnar thought he might as well try learning the thing everyone used as shorthand for impossible. What started as curiosity turned into a hobby, then a regular part of his life.

Ragnar spends around seven hours a week on Mandarin, including private lessons, Mandarin Monkey Hangouts, passive listening, YouTube videos, podcasts, music, and general exposure. He sees Hangouts less as “study” and more as practice. A place to use the language without it feeling like homework wearing a fake moustache.

His favourite method is passive input. Podcasts, videos, music, anything that trains his ear to hear Mandarin as separate words rather than one long mysterious noodle of sound. He does not stop every sentence to look things up because that ruins the fun and makes watching TV feel like filling in tax forms. Instead, he lets context do a lot of the work.

A strong theme in this conversation is learning through association. Ragnar talks about avoiding one-to-one translation and instead connecting Mandarin directly to meaning. Not “Chinese word equals English word,” but “Chinese word equals object, action, memory, or feeling.” He references the Fluent Forever idea of using personal images, like using a photo of your own dog to learn “dog,” rather than some dead-eyed stock photo Labrador from the cursed internet.

He also talks about using Mandarin to think around missing words. Instead of asking “How do I say this in English first?” he tries to stay inside Mandarin and find another route. Describe it. Rebuild it. Walk around the missing word like a linguistic traffic cone.

His short-term goal is not necessarily to cram new vocabulary, but to better use what he already knows. He understands more than he can produce, so the focus now is fluency, sentence structure, and getting existing knowledge out of the dusty cupboard in his head and into actual speech.

Overall, Ragnar’s approach is calm, consistent, and very practical: input to learn, output to practise, personal associations to remember, and enough community to keep going when work and life try to quietly murder the routine.

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In this episode of The Learner Journals, Tom speaks with Jane, live in the Mandarin Monkey studio, about how she learns Mandarin and why she keeps going.

Jane has always liked languages, which immediately makes her suspicious because apparently some people enjoyed French at school. She studied French and Spanish, had passionate teachers, and later became fascinated by people who could move between languages with ease. After a busy legal career and a period of burnout, she came back to languages because she wanted something that was just for fun.

Her Mandarin journey began through a friend who had lived in Beijing and offered casual Chinese lessons. From there, Jane discovered Mandarin podcasts, Pop Up Chinese, Mandarin Monkey, Chinglish conversations, graded readers, flashcards, Duolingo, Chinese Skill, lessons with Cynthia, and group Hangouts.

Jane’s method is a messy but effective mix: regular listening, grammar-focused lessons, vocabulary through flashcards, reading graded versions of Journey to the West, and using Mandarin in small real-life moments whenever she can. She likes grammar, likes flashcards, and liked languages at school, so she is basically the rare shiny Pokémon of language learners.

A big theme in this conversation is learning Mandarin without a fixed external goal. Jane is not studying for a job, a test, or a move abroad. She is learning because she enjoys it. Her dream is to one day chat naturally with Mandarin speakers, read more Chinese literature, and maybe be brave enough to use Mandarin in Chinatown without immediately pointing at the menu like a frightened tourist.

Her final advice is wonderfully simple: use Chinglish. It works. It gives learners enough English to stay inside the conversation, while feeding them Mandarin in a way that does not feel like being attacked by a grammar textbook in a dark alley.

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In this episode of The Learner Journals, Tom speaks with Alex, also known as “The Phenom”, about how language learning fits into a life already full of learning, from rowing and coding to French and Mandarin.

Alex’s Mandarin journey began through work. After being sent to factories in China with very little Mandarin, he quickly saw how powerful even a basic introduction could be. A few simple sentences helped people open up, ask him questions, and treat him differently. Later, seeing how machine-translated emails stripped away the politeness and nuance from Chinese made him realise how much gets lost when you cannot understand a language directly.

Alex talks about learning French first, partly out of spite, which is probably one of the more honest motivations ever admitted on a language podcast. But through French, he discovered how speaking someone’s native language lets you meet a more genuine version of them.

His Mandarin routine is built around reading, character recognition, one-to-one lessons, and finding input that is actually interesting. He uses graded readers like Mandarin Companion, studies characters through Mandarin Blueprint and Anki, and prefers content that feels like part of life rather than homework. His current focus is improving listening, which he admits is his weakest area.

The conversation covers why characters are less scary once you break them down, why reading helps grammar stick, why embarrassment is unavoidable, why boring sentence drills are basically linguistic punishment, and why the best learning method is usually the one you can keep doing without wanting to throw yourself into the sea.

Alex’s biggest advice is simple: don’t avoid characters, don’t force yourself through boring material forever, and find things you genuinely care about. Attack the language from as many angles as possible until something sticks.

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In this episode of The Learner Journals, Tom speaks with Dan, a long-time Mandarin Monkey supporter, about one of the strangest and most committed Mandarin learning journeys so far.

Dan’s Mandarin story starts with a dream about riding a unicycle. After buying one and learning to ride it, he realised there were other things he had avoided simply because they seemed too difficult. One of those things was learning another language. Mandarin felt alien, fascinating, and completely different from anything he had tried before, so he jumped in.

Dan now studies Mandarin for around 20 hours a week. His routine includes active listening during commutes, daily handwritten Chinese journal entries, reading graded readers, reviewing lesson recordings, using tools like Pleco, Purple Culture, YellowBridge, a translation pen, and taking multiple lessons and hangouts every week.

The conversation covers motivation, repetition, retention, handwriting, listening struggles, learning how you learn, why finding the right teacher matters, and why Mandarin is less like memorising a textbook and more like learning to ride a unicycle on concrete. You fall off, work out why, and get back on.

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