134. The Inspiring Achievements of Our Members

0:00 Affiliate Link & Reviews

Become a Mandarin Blueprint Affiliate

Leave us a Google Business Review 🙂

Leave us a Facebook Review

2:00 Comments & Emails 37:00 37:00 37:00 37:00 37:00 37:00 37:00 37:00 37:00

0:00 Affiliate Link & Reviews

Become a Mandarin Blueprint Affiliate

Leave us a Google Business Review 🙂

Leave us a Facebook Review

0:05 Comments & Emails

Alex Sumray on Level 57 Complete

Wow, mazeltov congrats and 恭喜 to all you fellow intermediate finishers.

I had planned to finish the final 30 characters over the course of the next two weeks, but I woke up today and decided to just rip the plaster off and I can’t really believe I’ve reached this point.

Going to China was never really on my agenda up until a few years ago and even when I was there, learning Mandarin was never something I put much thought into (too hard init).

Then one day, scrolling through Facebook “ah man, bloody ads”. But praise the lord for autoplay. A free trial later and now maybe eleven months on, with 1530 characters down, it’s all a bit surreal and I’m excited for my future Mandarin journey.

I am now more than happy to have a good lie down until the next course comes out (honestly, no rush lads!). A huge thank you to you both, what you have created is an achievement you should be really proud of and I think has opened an otherwise quite impenetrable Chinese made door one of those automatic sensor doors (basically you’ve made the whole thing easy!).

Thank you!

3:32

Al (泰光) Roy (王) on Level 22 Complete

“This is Ridiculous to Say, But…

We’re proud of you. Yeah, Luke and I have (probably) never met you and saying “we’re proud of you” suggests that your perseverance is somehow anything other than individual achievement on your part, but I don’t know; it just feels right. I think of the fact that you’ve come this far, you’re reading this email, and I feel joy and admiration at the thought that you’re genuinely bettering yourself.

Take that moment to recognize your success and use it as fuel to keep going.”

Well, Phil: upon reading that, I can attest to it being anything but ridiculous (I know you know that). And while I can only speak on my own behalf, I am sure that my thoughts here are shared by many others when I say that I feel a measure of pride in you two as well; not only because of your (IMHO) groundbreaking work, but because I do get the sense that it truly matters to you that your students succeed with learning Mandarin, for reasons other than only business related – as important as that is.

Your passion and enthusiasm for what you both do, and for what you are helping us do comes across in spades on your videos, to a degree that I believe is impossible to fake and still be believable.

We all have to make a living, and business is of course business; but the human element – the fact that you guys actually care – at the end of the day, that’s what really matters. Just know that as I see things, you are in your own way making the world a better place to be.

Thank you for what you do; you’re definitely on the right track!

9:42

Anita Rogers by Community

Hi. I’m a retired business owner, legal editor, and sixth-grade English and Reading teacher. I jumped into seriously learning Mandarin a few weeks ago as I want to keep my brain active and I wanted something challenging! Definitely found that in learning Chinese! I’ve learned many characters and words by sight and can understand a couple of hundred conversational words when I hear them (just a bit of Chinese movie watching has gone on here!)

Here’s my issue. As a Reading and English teacher as well as my 10 years of reading legal opinions and cases for a legal publishing company 8-10 hours every day, I find that I might need to just concentrate on pronunciation for a while and not get into anything else. The reason I’m thinking that is that whenever I see anything in Pinyin, my brain just automatically assigns English pronunciation to it. It’s annoying! I’m sure most second language learns suffer from this, but it is driving me crazy. I feel like I’m stumbling around trying to get my brain back to thinking in Chinese. I don’t want to establish bad habits as I know how hard they are to correct. Should I veer away from learning words and characters and just focus on the pronunciation unit until it becomes as automatic as English? Or, should I not focus as much on looking at Pinyin and just on the characters? Any feedback is appreciated. Even if it is frustrating, I’m NOT giving up! Stubborn determination has set in, and I will make my brain cooperate! Thanks!

15:53

Chad Erickson by Community

Hi Phil and Luke,

Thanks for the great product. I used to live in Chengdu and have been studying Mandarin for 3 years or so off and on. My current level is HSK 3/600 characters. I wanted to start the Mandarin Blueprint from the beginning so I would be able to build the hanzi movie method techniques necessary for learning words in the future. I already have an intimate understanding of many of the words introduced in Phase 1 and 2 due to pure exposure and repetition the past 3 years. Do you see any downside to me skipping the “make a movie” part for these words? In general, if there are any words that us students already are very familiar with, can we save the time and “mental imagery space” by just skipping the movie making part?

Chad

20:15

Marek Kasperski on BONUS: SRS – The Memory Game

So unbelievably cool. You guys are the masters. What you are saying just works beautifully. I’m convinced… I’m learning.

22:55

Eugenia Verenko on Unit 5 Wrap-Up

love how quickly Phil talks through the wrap-ups, and thanks ever so much for creating Anki cards for the whole course (what a huge job!!)