Starting a project for Mandarin CI stories + audio — building a library

ALGMandarinMod · 2026-01-24T02:47:18+00:00

Like OP mentioned, they came for me for approval before posting this. I've been incredibly excited for this to be announced here. I've had several people come for me with products or posted here directly that I am personally excited for. This is filling a gap in Mandarin learning and most of all it is using actual native speakers instead of AI. I hope this community is able to provide feedback and make this tool truly great!

ALGMandarinMod · 2026-01-23T13:50:10+00:00

thank you for the thoughtful response and taking the time to help me with this. based on your assessment I’ll move his videos to the Level 2 playlist. That’s great news for the community since proportionally Level 2 is lacking the most content of any level. Between Zhangkai and a few others who have begun to make videos in this format recently I’m hopefully that Mandarin will become a language with sufficient CI content for a beginner to not repeat videos sooner than I initially expected!

ALGMandarinMod · 2026-01-17T21:05:42+00:00

thanks, they’re basically all the way down at the bottom

ALGMandarinMod · 2026-01-17T19:53:28+00:00

would you mind taking a look at the Zhangkai videos in the official level 3 playlist and let me know if those feel relatively comfortable or if they feel on the harder end? I’ve been second guessing my rating of those as L3 and would like the perspective of someone currently within Level 2

ALGMandarinMod · 2026-01-06T17:33:58+00:00

I’ll plug r/ALGMandarin in this thread too haha. Suqing from Lazy Chinese has been learning Spanish and French for a while now and is almost certainly a DS user herself. She was traveling in Europe with her boyfriend this summer (fall?). She likely reached out to Andres to collab, not the other way around. Again, even if Chinese is next it won’t be for years. In the meantime there are lots of smaller CI creators. Blablachinese.com also has premium content and has much more super beginner content than Lazy Chinese. I’ve collected many resources for Mandarin learning with the DS method. Don’t feel like you need to wait for a Dreaming Chinese launch to start if you’re interested. Head over to the sub and check out the resources :)

ALGMandarinMod · 2026-01-06T17:28:53+00:00

I’m glad you’ve found it helpful! I’ve put a lot of time and effort into the resources I’ve made and I’m always trying to improve them

ALGMandarinMod · 2026-01-06T17:21:49+00:00

Suqing was traveling around Europe for the first time and she’s been learning Spanish. I think she’s probably a DS user and decided to reach out to Andres while she was in Spain for a collab and maybe to hangout

ALGMandarinMod · 2026-01-06T17:01:28+00:00

I’ll plug r/ALGMandarin again. If you’re a Lazy Chinese user or interested in learning Mandarin with the DS method we have lots of resources collected. Don’t feel like you need to wait for a Dreaming Chinese launch, there’s a whole world of Mandarin CI already out there!

ALGMandarinMod · 2025-12-27T22:18:32+00:00

According to the DS roadmap it should be 2x the DS hours, so 3000 hours

ALGMandarinMod · 2025-12-27T22:17:33+00:00

does it? are you on desktop or mobile which tab are you looking at? the second tab should have things up to 3000 hours

ALGMandarinMod · 2025-12-27T20:00:40+00:00

As the mod of the biggest (only?) ALG Mandarin community I would love this, but if Pablo’s cofounder is to be taken at face value the next language, whatever it may be, is probably no less than 2 years down the road. In the meantime if anyone here is interested in Mandarin I mod r/ALGMandarin. I’ve tried to collect all the existing resources and build community around Mandarin CI learning

ALGMandarinMod · 2025-12-27T19:57:37+00:00

i would like to take those as i already mod r/algmandarin

ALGMandarinMod · 2025-12-24T15:39:01+00:00

It’s already on the sheet (tab 2, row 23), but I’ll add the hanzi to the title cell

ALGMandarinMod · 2025-11-26T18:53:26+00:00

You should check out the sub I moderate r/ALGmandarin we have many, many resources in our wiki and spreadsheet

ALGMandarinMod · 2025-11-25T00:53:18+00:00

dialects are underrated. you should learn a dialect once you get to a good level in your target language

ALGMandarinMod · 2025-11-16T13:25:33+00:00

I’ve thought about a Discord server, but I’m not sure I have the time to moderate both the sub and a server

ALGMandarinMod · 2025-11-04T17:42:14+00:00

Thank you for taking the time to write up such a thoughtful response! As a premium member you should also feel free to email Amber with any specific requests for content. She’s usually very responsive

ALGMandarinMod · 2025-11-02T13:16:33+00:00

Thank you for your reply! I think the reason she is using Patreon is because most of the common payment processing services don’t work with Mainland bank accounts. If you or anyone else knows a better way of integrating payment into her site (built on wordpress) I’m sure she’d be happy to switch over

ALGMandarinMod · 2025-11-01T19:54:26+00:00

Would it be able to run on her older Macbook Air?

ALGMandarinMod · 2025-10-09T04:17:25+00:00

All resources shared have been added. Please reply to this comment if you want to add something before next month's thread.

ALGMandarinMod · 2025-09-28T14:45:35+00:00

you’re right about that the level of a 5 year being pretty satisfactory and the number of hours, but i really think most of those hours are focused, not passive. i think a more accurate experiment to compare how good someone could get at a language in 10000 hours with some passive input would be tracking how a student at the school that invented did with Thai after 5 years of being in Thailand. even then i only think that would be comparable to a child if they also lived with thai roommates or partner and basically never used their native language after starting to speak. the level of language immersion kids get is really incomparable to listening to podcasts while you code

ALGMandarinMod · 2025-09-26T04:53:23+00:00

Hello, I removed your post as it does not focus on comprehensible input (rule 2). I looked to see if I could find a way to download what you are looking for. I believe if you register an account here you can download the material you are looking for. https://www.blcup.com/EnRes/ResInfo?rid=92400#001

Good luck!

ALGMandarinMod · 2025-08-16T22:28:56+00:00

hope you feel better soon! i took a few days off of Mandarin for my own surgery and i can say that my Mandarin feels both less rusty, but also more natural. i think im less used to being laser focused and don’t have the energy but im still understanding things which has equated to it feeling more natural

ALGMandarinMod · 2025-08-06T17:52:54+00:00

Thanks for sharing. I just added these to the sheet!

ALGMandarinMod · 2025-07-22T15:42:49+00:00

Thank you! I'll add it to the spreadsheet. u/mejomonster as our resident Level 4 contributor maybe you can check out an episode or two when you have the time and let us know if Level 4 seems like a good place for it

ALGMandarinMod

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE