Will I ever learn Chinese
Is it even possibly to learn Chinese? Linguistics professor Jeanette Sakel tried it out, telling us about her successes and failures along the way.
- Update frequency
- every 2 days
- Average duration
- 19 minutes
- Episodes
- 30
- Years Active
- 2024
Making sense of the chaos
Chinese has many homophones: words that sound the same. And when you are only just entering the intermediate stage and are still not very confident when it comes to the different 'tones…
Chinese, my escape from reality
In this episode I describe how learning Chinese became my treasured escape from reality. I wanted to tell everyone about my new language and also start speaking Chinese with real people…
Learning to write Chinese characters
When I realised that learning to read and write Chinese characters would help me in my learning, I started to add a writing app to my repertoire of learning methods. Suddenly the charac…
Making learning Chinese fun
Do people really have different learning preferences, and how do you go about finding yours? In this episode I reflect on my language learning back at school, which, mildly put, was a d…
Reflecting on my learning and fine-tuning my learning approach
I look at how Chinese is different from the other languages I speak, and how I was dealing with this difficulty. Also, after the first few weeks of learning Chinese, I noticed that I wa…
Do we really need to learn explicit grammar rules?
Children learn their first language without looking up any grammar rules, so why can't adults do the same? In this episode look at how the grammars of the world's languages differ. Havi…
Finding the right method to learn Chinese
Once I had decided to learn Chinese, I needed to find the right method to do so. In this episode I describe my thought-process and why started with an app that was entirely in Chinese, …
What is Chinese and is it difficult to learn?
In this episode I look at what the term 'Chinese' refers to. Mandarin? Cantonese? Why are there so many different terms for Chinese in Chinese itself? I try to investigate whether Chine…
Do age and talent affect language learning?
Would a 49-year-old even be able to learn a new language? Spoiler alter: yes! But why are people different in their language-learning success? What affects language learning? In this ep…
Introduction: why I started learning Chinese
Hi, I’m Jeanette Sakel and I’m a professor of Language and Linguistics. I’m an avid language learner... or at least used to be, until I settled into a permanent teaching post, had a kid…