Hi, I’m Andrew, the founder of RealTime Mandarin…

I’ll teach you Chinese internet slang as it’s used today, so you can instantly sound more like a native speaker, and confidently get stuck into interesting conversations with real people right now.

Because I’ve been teaching myself for more than 25 years. I’ve learned it the hard way through extensive travel in China and Taiwan, and a long career in business.

I’ve worked with Chinese entrepreneurs, investors, and teams, using my language daily in the trenches of doing business with China.

I’ve spent the last 5+ years building RealTime Mandarin. It’s the world’s only platform for teaching Chinese through real news as it’s happening. Working with my team of native speakers, I now help over 13,000 learners learn Chinese as it’s actually spoken today every week.

And now I’ve built a free resource from my extensive archive to help you instantly sound more like a native speaker in 2026 with 25 modern Chinese internet slang phrases.

It began when I stopped off in China in 2002 on my way to Australia. I arrived in Beijing one grey winter morning by train from Mongolia, having travelled over land from London on the Trans-Siberian Railway.

I had no plan, other than to go on an adventure.

Two months in China turned into six months, and then a year.

By the time I left a year later, I was already hooked and couldn’t wait to get back.

When I eventually did get to Australia, I quickly got bored. So after six months in Oz I decided to go to Taiwan, where I spent another 3 years teaching English and learning Chinese.

I came back to London in 2006, where I took a Master’s degree in Chinese.

I went on to have a career as an interpreter and advisor between the UK and China, using my Mandarin daily.

Then when COVID hit the UK in March 2020, stuck at home unable to travel to China, my language skills quickly deteriorated.

I forgot words, my tones sounded awful, and my active language shrunk to just basic expressions.

And nearly 20 years of hard work learning Chinese was fading away.

I tried all the usual fixes: apps, graded readers, the latest textbooks, and YouTube channels.

But none of them helped.

So, I set myself a reading challenge: to read the news in Chinese every morning for 20 minutes.

I began learning new phrases every day from reading real news. Like idioms, internet slang, and new expressions.

These were the kinds of things that all Chinese people “just know” but would trip up any language learner.

So after nearly four-months of daily reading, I decided to start publishing what I learned each week in a newsletter. I first hit “publish” on 7 February 2021.

To begin with it was to an audience of 56 friends.

Now, over 5 years on, having published every week since then, the audience has grown to over 13,000 Mandarin enthusiasts and China watchers, including journalists, think tankers, academics, executives, and diplomats.

Working with my team of native speakers every week, I help my readers stay current, informed, and able to communicate confidently in Chinese in the real world.

Along the way I’ve kept a database of every word and phrase I learned and taught.

It’s updated every week, and now has over 7,000 entries including over 1,000 internet slang expressions.

And now I’ve hand-picked 25 essential phrases this huge archive to help you learn Chinese internet slang as it’s spoken today.