In my continued attempts to not be stuck as that English person at the event who assumes all others will speak the same language as me, I once again set out to try and learn another language.

In this case, the language is Mandarin Chinese. In the past I have tried duolingo and other applications which proclaim to help you learn a language. These applications and books have never been very much use for me to learn to speak or write the language. Only really providing me with a lot of vocabulary without much context.

Instead I will be trying the “immersion” approach to learning a language. This is where you overload yourself with frequent genuine and context heavy content in the hope that by reading it, trying to understand it and doing this repeatedly, the brain will simply adapt and the language will be picked up “naturally”.

This approach relies on lots of input at first and then some output in time. With less of a focus on speaking or writing early on. As I have some experience with Chinese - although very very basic experience. I am adding this page to my website as a place where I can try and write simple output.

The reason for a blog and not just a notebook or empty text file is that this approach should give some context to what I am doing, as well as a running history and log of my thoughts as I go through for me more than for anyone else. It can also serve as a place to point people when they ask how my language learning is going.

Let’s start!

这是个博客。我是学的中文。即使很难和我是很忙。今天我的中文的不好。我要有的中文的好。我的工作是在一家中国公司工作。他们帮我学习。