I'm Learning Mandarin

Links;

Notebook LM: https://notebooklm.google.com/

My website: imlearningmandarin.com

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In this episode, I’m sharing a tool that’s completely blown my mind, it might be one of the most impressive things I’ve ever come across for language learning. It’s called Notebook LM, and it’s a website run by Google.

Here’s what makes it so powerful: you can feed it any content: websites, text, even audio, and it will generate a podcast-style conversation between what sound like two real human voices. The result is super chatty, natural, and surprisingly hard to tell it’s AI-generated.

I first discovered NotebookLM a few months ago and started using it to make casual English podcasts. At the time, I remember wishing it supported other languages, especially Mandarin, because it just seemed like it had so much potential for language learning.

Well, that’s now changed, NotebookLM recently rolled out support for a bunch of new languages, including Mandarin. So today, I’m going to walk you through how this tool works and how you can use it to supercharge your Mandarin learning.

Links:Sign up for the I'm Learning Mandarin Newsletter to get updates as soon as new spaces become available at the I'm Learning Mandarin gym: https://imlearningmandarin.com/Find out more about the I'm Learning Mandarin gym: https://imlearningmandarin.com/gymChris Blogpost Month 1: https://imlearningmandarin.com/2024/1...Chris Blogpost Month 2: https://imlearningmandarin.com/2025/0... Chris's Blogpost Month 3: https://imlearningmandarin.com/2025/0...Chris's Blogpost Month 4 & 5: https://imlearningmandarin.com/2025/0...--A few months ago, I received an email from a Mandarin learner named Chris Foley.Chris had been studying the language for several years and could already hold conversations. After marrying his Chinese wife, he set an ambitious new goal: to sharpen his spoken delivery, especially his pronunciation and tones, in time for his Chinese wedding ceremony in 12 months. Soon after, he joined the I’m Learning Mandarin gym, with me as his coach, and committed to documenting his journey through monthly blogs and interviews at the 6-month and 12-month marks.In this video, I speak with Chris entirely in Mandarin to reflect on his progress at the 6-month milestone.

Chris Foley has set himself a challenge to become conversational in Mandarin within one year, in time for his Chinese wedding ceremony.

To reach his goals, he’s enlisted my help as his language coach. In this episode, I interview Chris entirely in Mandarin to document his progress over the past 6 months.

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Join the I'm Learning Mandarin Newsletter and be the first to find out when spaces open up at the gym: https://imlearningmandarin.com/

Follow Chris's progress story on the I'm Learning Mandarin blog: https://imlearningmandarin.com/2025/04/13/chris-foleys-mandarin-speaking-journey-months-4-5/

My blog: imlearningmandarin.com

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In this episode, I delve into the question: Is Taiwan a good place to study Mandarin? I draw on my experiences of living and studying in Taiwan and give it an overall rating out of 10 across three criteria:

1. Overall as a place to live.

2. Quality of teaching.

3. Immersive opportunities.

Links:

My blog: imlearningmandarin.com

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Links:

My blog: https://imlearningmandarin.com/

Mandarin Retreats: https://imlearningmandarin.com/uk-mandarin-immersion-retreats/

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New vocabulary learned:

Today, I'm going to talk through a really simple method that you can use to use AI to generate your very own Mandarin tongue twisters .

Recently, I started using a method with my students where we would create our own tongue twisters centered around their specific pronunciation problems.

Today, I'm going to explain in three simple stages how I've been creating these tongue twisters with my students and how they use them to improve their pronunciation.

On today's episode, I'm going to play my speech which I recently made at the Asiaglot conference in Taipei.

The speech is called The Inconvenient Truth About Mandarin Learning. And in it, I talk about my own Mandarin Learning Journey and some of the methods that I initially followed, which were a combination of traditional methods and also comprehensible input methods.

I go into how these methods worked to varying degrees, but there were certain obstacles that I came up against which I wasn't able to find any solutions to when turning to traditional education or comprehensible input.

And I go on to talk about what the solutions that I did find involved, and how that really helped me on my Mandarin learning journey.

The audio recording quality of this speech that I gave at Asiaglot was not the best, but I've tried to salvage it a little bit through some editing. So hopefully it's good enough that you can hear it pretty clearly.2

Links:

Discord server: https://discord.gg/b9PAyKwT9p

My Asiaglot experience: https://imlearningmandarin.com/2025/03/30/my-experience-at-asiaglot-asias-hottest-multilingual-conference/

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This week on the I'm Learning Mandarin podcast, I discuss how you can use Deepseek as a game-changing tool to become fluent in Chinese.

As we've previously covered, while tools like ChatGPT are helpful for various aspects of Mandarin learning, they often fall short when it comes to generating truly natural, colloquial speech.

This is because their training data seems to be heavily weighted towards more formal, sometimes translated sources.

Native speakers often point out that while ChatGPT's Mandarin is usually grammatically correct, it just doesn't sound like how real people talk.

That's where Deepseek, the Chinese version of ChatGPT, really excels.

Despite some of its limitations, such political censorship and data concerns, there is no doubt that it excels at generating authentic spoken Mandarin, which is exactly what we Mandarin learners need when it comes to improving our conversational skills.

So, how can you effectively use Deepseek to level up your spoken Mandarin?

Listen to the episode to find out!

Join the I'm Learning Mandarin Gym: imlearningmandarin.com/gym

As an ILM podcast listener, you can get 50% off your ILM Gym subscription when you use this discount code at checkout (offer ends April 9th): IMLEARNINGMANDARINPOD

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