Get your Mandarin skills up to date in 20 minutes a week
A resource to help you maintain and improve your language skills, and stay up to date with the latest language trends in China
Hello!
Welcome to RealTime Mandarin.
RealTime Mandarin is a free resource which helps Mandarin learners maintain and improve their language skills, and stay up-to-date with the latest language trends in China.
Published every Saturday, the newsletter spotlights one news story being discussed in China each week, explains the context (in English), and shares the language people are using to discuss it.
It helps you learn contemporary Chinese in context.
Lots of the words and phrases we share each week are not in any text book, or graded reader. Some aren’t even in the dictionary yet!
It’s real language, learned in real-time, which you need to know if you want to communicate in Chinese authentically in the real world.
Hi, I’m Andrew, and it’s great to meet you! 🤩
I started this publication in February 2021. It was my way to stop my hard-earned Chinese language skills, learned over more than 20 years, getting even rustier.
And I hope it can do the same for you.
At that time it wasn’t possible to travel to China. So, stuck at home during Covid, depressed that my language skills were getting worse by the day, I set myself a small goal (小目标) of reading one news article in Chinese every day.
I soon realised there were things I didn’t know in everything I read: idioms, slang, colloquialisms, internet words, and even ancient poems.
Because, as you know, if you don’t know the context - a historical reference, a recent news event, something that ‘everybody knows’ in China - then you’re completely stuck.
Lost.
That was how I felt.
So, I decided to share everything I learned.
Learning Chinese, and staying motivated, is hard. So I want as many people as possible to benefit from the content as possible.
That’s why this newsletter will always be free.
So, if you’re looking to get your Mandarin skills back up to date, you’re in the right place!
Select the “free” option for now and see if it’s right for you. It’s pitched at a more “advanced-ish” level, but it’s mainly written in English, so any learner of any language ability can get something from each newsletter.
Now you’ve signed up, what next?!
Recommended reading
Looking for some recommended reading to get stuck in to?
Here are some of our favourite posts for you to read from the free archive:
Community
You can also see more of what our global community of thousands of Mandarin learners and China watchers get up to in our meet-ups held in cities around the world here on our Community page.
That’s it for now.
I look forward to seeing you in your inbox on Saturday!