Friday mailbag time. Chinese and English together, as always.

Today you get listener stories about:

• Stress gestures that looked like a love confession

• Soft Mandarin that sounded like poetry underwater

• Motivation, guilt, discipline and VR boxing

• Ten minutes of bus auntie story with zero context

• Scooter fails in Taiwan and panic Mandarin

• Sounding fluent while saying nonsense

• Noodle theft in a Bristol flat

• Turning passive vocab into active speech

We talk through:

• How to describe emotions without strange vibes

• Why quiet Mandarin feels impossible to decode

• When to push through and when to rest

• How confidence helps even if the vocab falls apart

Email your story for a future mailbag:

chat@mandarinmonkey.com

Lessons, community, and all the good stuff:

mandarinmonkey.com

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A bilingual Mandarin and English episode filled with Christmas nonsense, food talk, and some heavier life planning.

We talk about UK food labels, sugar overload, and why buying cheese feels like a health exam. Then we drift into real life. Stress. Pressure. Planning the next five to ten years. And why that feels very different when you have kids, bills, and responsibilities.

Tom talks through moving to Taiwan with almost no plan. Ula talks about goals and why planning triggers old student stress. We look at how to balance enjoying the moment with taking care of future you.

If you want to practise listening to natural Mandarin and English in a real conversation, this episode is perfect.

You can book a free trial lesson at mandarinmonkey.com.

Send your emails for the Friday mailbag to chat@mandarinmonkey.com.

CHAPTERS

0:00 Intro

0:33 Christmas, turkeys, and the turducken problem

2:20 Giblets, guts, and Taiwanese menus

3:40 UK Christmas decorations and candy canes

5:15 Sugar, food labels, and supermarket misery

7:30 Comparing food labels in Taiwan and the UK

8:20 Sleeping positions and being the big spoon

10:50 Christmas hats, hoodies, and decorating the house

11:24 The smoke machine debate

12:40 Christmas lights and buying more nonsense

13:48 Teaching our daughter Mandarin

14:50 Talking about old homes and old decisions

16:10 How planning shapes the next 10 years

18:00 What peace, fun, and goals mean

20:00 Moving to Taiwan with no plan

22:30 Making mistakes when you’re young

24:40 Why planning feels heavier as an adult

27:00 Arriving in Taiwan with total freedom

30:00 Mixing living in the moment with long-term goals

33:00 Having things to look forward to

35:00 December Hangouts and lesson schedule

36:00 How to book lessons and send mailbag emails

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Friday mailbag. Mandarin and English. Real listener questions.

We start with a chat about long-term goals. Safety, peace, fun, love and connection. Where we want the kids to be in ten years. Where we want to live. How to build something bigger than “exercise more”.

Then the mailbag.

A night-shift worker in Leeds knows the vocab but freezes when building sentences.

A Birmingham listener orders bubble tea in Taichung without the cashier switching to English.

A software engineer in Dublin wants real conversations, not grammar workshops.

A listener in Seattle can hear J, Q and X but cannot say them.

A teacher in Wellington reads well but loses everything without subtitles.

We talk about progress, language habits, relationships, pronunciation, listening skills and how to keep going even when it feels slow.

Send your stories or questions to chat@mandarinmonkey.com.

For lessons or hangouts, visit mandarinmonkey.com.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We skip the small talk and jump straight into chaos. One of us wears noise-cancelling headphones with brown noise blasting. The other says sentences in Mandarin and English. The goal is simple. Lip read the line. No clues. No questions.

The results are a mess. “You squeezed it before I was ready,” becomes cheesecake. 羊羹 becomes “some kind of rat.” Twice becomes twat. And a totally normal Chinese sentence turns into Argentina.

If you enjoy Mandarin learning mixed with confusion, misread lips, and unearned confidence, this game delivers.

Send your sentences or game ideas to chat@mandarinmonkey.com.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Wrong day, wrong week, right podcast. Today’s mailbag episode starts with that weird moment when your brain swears Friday arrived, but the calendar says otherwise, then drifts into lottery fantasies, nannies who only speak Mandarin, and baldness fear. Standard Mandarin Monkey energy.

Then listener stories:

• Daniel in Manchester used Mandarin to survive lockdown loneliness and asks how to practice speaking when nerves block every sentence.

• John in Southern California listened to the whole podcast three times and still wants more. Respect.

• Debbie in Lagos started Mandarin because C-drama subtitles missed the point and now fights double audio and dodgy subs.

• Olivia fell in from the short clips, forgets new words in days, and wants to keep going without burnout.

• Vivi did “immersion” in Kaohsiung, made international friends, defaulted to English, and now only understands Mandarin with heavy context.

We talk about:

• Why tutors hear every mistake already and still support learners

• How mirroring and shadowing native speakers trains tones and rhythm

• Why motivation fades and discipline keeps progress alive

• How to use scripts, news, and audio to train listening without subtitles

• Single-channel brains, overwhelm, and why context helps more than people admit

Bilingual as always. Ula speaks Mandarin, Tom speaks English, you follow along.

Send your story or question to:

chat@mandarinmonkey.com

or DM on Instagram / Facebook.

Your email might show up in the next mailbag.

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We put on noise-canceling headphones, blasted brown noise, and tried to read each other’s lips in Chinese.

Spoiler: “Are you the king of Mandarin Monkey?” turned into “Are you licking a mandarin monkey?”We also talk about Tom’s 3D-printed bust mini-movie, the “shi” tongue twister that broke him, and why bringing back the silly side of Mandarin Monkey might be the best idea yet.

Send your stories for Friday Mailbag: chat@mandarinmonkey.com

Lessons and more at mandarinmonkey.com

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Mailbag time. Phoebe’s moving to China in a week, Jasmine’s torn between Simplified and Traditional, Mark nails his first all-Mandarin order, Anna shares tonal research, and Katie reminds us to slow down. We talk avoiding the foreigner bubble, finding a “language parent,” sleep habits, and why progress feels slow, until it doesn’t.

Send your story: chat@mandarinmonkey.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.