How is Real You Mandarin Different from Standard Chinese Learning Resources?

Real You Mandarin: Beginnings is an online Mandarin course tailor-made to meet the unique needs of American-born Mandarin speakers, focused on teaching you the most practical, immediately applicable Mandarin you need to feel confident expressing yourself in real life.

If any or all of the below describe your experience with Mandarin, Real You Mandarin: Beginnings is for you:

• You have relatively strong Mandarin speaking skills because you grew up speaking Mandarin at home, went to Chinese school as a kid, etc.

  
  

• You are able to hold your own in Mandarin conversations to a certain degree, but find yourself defaulting to "Chinglish," unconsciously inserting English words in the middle of your sentences when you come across words you don't know in Mandarin.

  
  

• You often feel blocked by vocabulary, character recognition, and even cultural differences when you try to express yourself in real life, particularly with native speaking family and friends.

  
  

• You want to improve your Mandarin, but don't have the time, energy, or desire to start from scratch or join standard Chinese classes where you'd simultaneously know much more than the students starting from a blank slate, but would also have glaring gaps in vocabulary, character recognition, and even more formal grammar.

  
  

• You don't even want to learn textbook Chinese because you find that it's not applicable to your real life.

  
  

• Even if you're confident in speaking at a "native" level, you have trouble talking about your experience growing up in the west because of how culturally different your life experience is from people native to China, Taiwan, and other Mandarin-first countries. Examples include differences in dating culture (i.e., defining the relationship), growing up as a minority in a majority society, media representation, mental health, and so many other topics where east and west don't quite align.

We are all too familiar with these challenges, because we suffered from the same! Tired of our fellow American-Born Chinese (ABCs) & American-Born Taiwanese (ABTs) friends being ignored by traditional Chinese language resources, we decided to build our own.

Real You Mandarin: Beginnings is neither limited to basic foundations like pronunciation and grammar, nor needlessly tries to cover the entirety of the Mandarin language.

Knowing that you value being able to speak confidently on meaningful topics but have other priorities in life that make a heavy time commitment prohibitive, our self-paced course prioritizes only what matters. The curriculum focuses specifically on real-life scenarios and topics that allow you to discuss important topics with friends and family on a deeper level.

All of our content is taught through video-based, realistic dialogues where we role play a real conversation you might want to have with family, friends, partners, etc. All videos are captioned with Traditional Chinese, pinyin pronunciation, and the English translation, and include an accompanying written transcript.

Within each dialogue, you'll learn the relevant vocabulary contextually, making it easier to remember. To solidify that memorization, we provide pre-built Anki flashcards (digital flashcards) of key vocab words for you to study on a regular basis - each vocab flashcard includes the Traditional Chinese, pinyin, English translation, a sample sentence, and audio pronunciation.

The best way for you to get the most out of the course content is not to simply watch each video, but rather to practice shadowing. We encourage you to follow along with each video, repeating back each line of dialogue as the speaker says it, watching out for pronunciation, cadence, and speed, and repeating the video and lines as many times as necessary in order to get to the point where you are speaking at the same time as the speaker. That way, you're letting your mouth get the reps in practicing speaking Mandarin and these newly learned words in the contexts you'd probably be using them in real life. If you're interested in learning more about shadowing and why this technique is so powerful, follow along on the blog as we'll go more in-depth on that later.

If you're interested in seeing exactly what we're talking about, preview a free lesson in our course HERE and try out shadowing the video, reading through the transcripts, and working through the Anki flashcards. If you vibe with this learning method, we welcome you to join the course and unlock the entire library of content instantaneously. Let us help you unlock the real you when you speak Mandarin.