Mandarin Monkey Podcast

This podcast is one of the worst out there for people trying to learn Chinese. You have one person speaking English the entire time and the other speaking Chinese, but terms and vocabulary are rarely explained. The topics are extremely random and low effort and the husband is borderline verbally abusive to his wife. He tells her to shut up in at least a couple episodes. Unsubscribe.

This podcast is great for passive listening. The English / Chinese split means that I can follow along, and I don’t feel like I’m stuck in a regimented class. I’m always impressed how the hosts can talk about seemingly anything. This podcast is a great complement to a well rounded learning approach.

There are two things that have helped my Chinese improve the most: 1. Talking to native speaker(s) every week 2. Listening to this show every day When you start looking around for how to improve your listening, you’ll find a lot about comprehensible input. Then you’ll go looking for input and if you’re not upper intermediate it’s all going to be really boring and basic. This show is PERFECT because the half English allows your brain time to figure out what Ula said. Really removes the overwhelm you might feel if you try a 100% Chinese podcast. So it’s actual people talking about actual things, but you’re still getting language exposure. Plus they’re funny and sweet and relatable. This isn’t “optimized” like some podcasts or tools might be, but it’s entertaining and comprehensible enough I actually keep listening to it, which I think is ultimately the most important aspect of any language learning tool. If it’s fun, do it!

You need quite a bit more than a beginning level of Chinese to follow what they’re talking about. I’m sure it’s great if you already speak Chinese but he doesn’t translate what she’s saying more than half the time, so I’m left scratching my head instead of learning.