Judith Meyer: Learning Chinese and developing LearnYu.com
Kris Broholm welcomes Judith Meyer to discuss learning Chinese. They explore strategies for character acquisition and initial learning steps. The conversation also covers Meyer's development of LearnYu.com, an automated Chinese learning service.
September 26, 2014 · 35 min
EP 29: Judith Meyer: Learning Chinese and developing LearnYu.com
0:00 / 35:02
Guest
Judith Meyer
What You'll Hear
- 1 Podcast Welcome & LearnYou Introduction
- 2 Is Chinese Learning Truly Difficult?
- 3 Mastering Tones and Mandarin Dialects
- 4 Efficiently Learning Chinese Characters
- 5 Introducing LearnYou: Adaptive Chinese Course
- 6 Developing LearnYou: Challenges & Benefits
- 7 LearnYou's Free Model & Support
- 8 Final Call to Action & Farewell
Links Mentioned
Questions Covered in the Show
Is Chinese difficult to learn?- 6m
What is the best way to learn Chinese independently?- 8m
Are Chinese tones difficult to learn?- 11m
What is the best method for learning Chinese characters?- 13m
What is LearnYou?- 18m
How much does LearnYou cost?- 31m
Related Episodes
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Actual Fluency Podcast episode 29.
Welcome to the Actual Fluency podcast. The podcast that gives you the tools and inspiration to learn languages faster and more efficiently. And now your host, Kris Broholm.
Today's episode of the Actual Fluency Podcast is brought to you in partnership with Audible audiobooks. Get your free audiobook by going to audibletrial.com/fluency.
Hello, hello, hello, hello. This is the Actual Fluency podcast for language learners and aspiring polyglots or actual polyglots if you are one. It's for everyone basically. I'm here to provide you with motivation, inspiration, and empowerment that language learning truly is accessible to just about everyone. Or let's say actually everyone.
This week's episode features Judith Mayer, who was here on the third episode of the podcast. So if you haven't yet listened to episode three, which is one of the very popular episodes of the podcast, I suggest you go back and listen to that before listening to this. Before I send you over to the interview with Judith, I just wanted to say thank you so much for being a listener and making the show awesome. You know, it's basically you are the reason I'm doing this. And sometimes we I forget to acknowledge that. So I just want to say thank you for listening. That's the most important thing, getting it out there.
And the second little thing I want to mention is that if you're a big fan of the show, and you want to get the first 25 episodes conveniently bundled up and labeled, so you can easily transfer them to a mobile device, a tablet or whatever. And then I'm currently running a close beta test of a bundle with those exact episodes, where when you purchase the bundle, you also get access to a kind of a package of previously unreleased features. And there's an exclusive episode, there's some exclusive interviews and there's some exclusive videos and stuff.
If you are interested in beta testing this product for me, and basically beta testing is just to test out the sales process, the presentation, the content, and the price point and everything. Feel free to send me an email at kris@actualfluency.com and just put podcast bundle in the headline. And everyone who is invited to take part in the beta program will receive a discount voucher for the bundle. And also the first few people who contact me will also get a free $10 voucher for iTalki. So you can go ahead and book your language learning lesson without cost. Or at least, you know, get most of it funded. I know that most people, most tutors do charge more than $10, but this is the this is what we have to work with. And as, you know, as I mentioned, just send me an email if you're interested and I'll give you the link. And all that I ask in return is that you just fill in a little questionnaire about the process and give me any feedback that you might have.
So enough about that, and we're almost ready to go to the interview with Judith Meyer. Before we get into that interview, I just want to be completely transparent, and in the interview, I will be or me and Judith would be talking about her new service LearnYou, which is an automatic service for learning Chinese. And it may seem as though, you know, we're pitching it quite hard to you guys. But in fact, it's first of all, it's a free service and it always will be free, Judith told me. And secondly, I've tried the service myself. I've been beta testing it. And I also supported it with $100 of my own of my own money. So I believe in this product and it's not kind of a, you know, it's not a it's not a sales pitch for the sake of sales pitching it. You know, Judith is a good friend of mine and she puts out quality stuff.
So, you know, half of this episode is a lot about learning Chinese specifically, what is good about, you know, how to learn the characters, and what should I learn first. And then the second half is kind of going into making an automated learning process. And in there we get into a lot of the qualities that LearnYou has, and how the process has been for her.
If you want to support the LearnYou project, the Indiegogo donation drive is still open for a few more days. So please, if you are interested in learning Chinese and supporting the development of a much, much, much more easier way to learn Chinese, then go on to learnyou.com. That's L E A R N Y O U.com. And just check it out, you know, it's free to try. Well, it will be free for everything, but right now you can try out the the first lesson just to see how it is. And then when it's out of beta, you'll be given access to all of it for absolutely no money.
So I really appreciate these initiatives in the language learning world where people are kind of given tools that allow them to learn languages cheaper. I mean free and more efficiently as well. That's kind of what the whole show is about, discovering these things. And I will be learning Chinese in about, you know, I'm thinking next year maybe, but it might be the year after. I'm not 100% sure, but I know that I want to learn Chinese at some point. It's just too cool with the with the characters and and the and the tones. So that's all for me this time and and as always, you know, have a great day and I hope you enjoy listening to the podcast, and I'll see you in the next one.
All right, everyone. Today's guest really requires no introduction, but I'm going to give you one anyway. She was the guest of episode three of this very podcast and she hosted the highly praised polyglot gathering in Berlin. Apart from these great feats, she also speaks some 13 languages and is currently busy promoting her new automagic Chinese course. Judith, it's so good to have you back on the show. How have you been?
Oh, I've been doing really well. Thank you.
Oh, fantastic. And of course, for the listeners out there who didn't listen to the third episode yet, it would be wise for them to go back and maybe listen to some of your language story because we won't really have time to go into that. But the interesting bit that's going on right now is Chinese.
Yes.
So we decided to sit down and record an episode about how to best learn Chinese. And I guess the first question that anyone would ask you is, isn't it difficult to learn Chinese?
Well, yes and no. I mean, basic Chinese is possibly the easiest language you've ever learned, because the grammar is basically non-existent, and the vocabulary is very versatile, you need very few words and you can say a lot. So, just to get a grounding in Chinese to say tourist level or beginner level to talk about yourself, your friends, it's quite easy to do.
But then as you progress, it gets quite hard because of the cultural influences.
Mhm. And also, I suppose the the writing? Reading or writing?
Yeah, the writing system was actually quite a lot of trouble. So, yeah, when I say it's very easy, I mean, if you're going to go for a spoken approach and learn how to speak the language, just based on.
Right. Exactly. And when you first got into Chinese, what how did you attack it, so to speak? What got you interested, and what did you first do?
Oh, I I was always fascinated by Chinese. I think I was 14 or so, I already knew that I wanted to learn Chinese eventually.
Oh, wow.
No, I wasn't I wasn't courageous enough to do it then, because I had never studied a language in self-study. But when I was 18, I read about a Chinese learning competition, which was only open to high school students. And I was in my last year of high school. So I knew I had to study Chinese then. I had to start.
Oh, so you start really early.
Yeah, and I self-studied Chinese, which wasn't very bright, because it's such a different language and I had never studied a non-European language until then. So, I didn't get very far, but it was good enough for the competition and I I won a six-week trip to China to attend an intensive language course there. So, that really helped.
Right. So you got a a lot of help to learn it in the beginning.
Yes, I did.
How would you go back and and learn it if you had to learn it completely on your own?
Uh, I would probably use the internet a lot because there are so many resources out there right now. I think the Chinese government and also other organizations are pouring a lot of money into learning Chinese. So, you can find some really cool stuff online.
And then, yeah, you you need you need to make a holistic approach, you need to hear the language a lot, you need to speak it a lot, you need to write it a lot, you need to read it a lot, and just get get used to to this language. It's not a language where you can get by translating from your own language or from another language like, if you're learning Spanish and you're a Italian speaker, you can probably do that. But to learn Chinese, you really have to have a lot of input and get a lot of corrections on your output.
Right. And it's not a a language you learn in three months.
No, that's not.
You need.
Tourist level, like I said, but beyond that, no, that's it's it's a very complex language with a long history, longer than any other language that you may be learning. So, yeah, there's a lot to study especially at the more advanced levels. A lot of expressions that are thousands of years old and that you need to be aware of and Yeah.
Right. And it's very beautiful too.
Yeah, it's very beautiful too.
Yeah, I can imagine. I'm looking forward to studying it. And of course, we've been talking about Mandarin. You didn't study get into Cantonese, you didn't find the exciting or anything.
Uh, I mean, Mandarin is already enough for me. I'm still studying it ten years later.
Right.
So, But the other the other dialects are not really useful. Maybe if you're going to talk to the expat community, there are a lot of Cantonese speakers or other dialects. But in China itself, everyone speaks Mandarin. And yeah, the it's not like with Arabic that people are not used to speaking Mandarin. They're used to speaking Mandarin, they speak Mandarin every day. So, it's I don't really see the point of learning Cantonese, it's more like learning Swiss German, I guess.
Right. But that would be fun too.
It would be. It's also a beautiful language. You can do it but.
Exactly. It's not really urgent. Exactly. And the other I suppose difference other than the character system is the tonal system.
Yes.
How did you first kind of perceive this and how did that change over the years the tonal system?
A lot of people tell me that the tones must be very difficult, but I never thought so. Because there's an analogy that works very well in German and I guess also English but not so much French or so that is we're actually using the tones. We're using the tones in our everyday speech. And we're just not using them actively, we're not aware of them.
But if you're thinking, this is a story I always tell, it works pretty well. Um, so you imagine like a little boy and he sees an airplane in the sky. And so he goes there. There. And in German it would be da, da, which works better for Chinese because Chinese doesn't have this there sound. So it goes da, da. And that would be the first tone. And now there is his father and he can't really see what the boy is pointing at. So he goes da, there. That's the second tone. And then the little boy imitates it, like a little bit ridiculing, maybe a bit. So like da, da. There, there. And that's the third tone. And then he he says it with a lot of stress affirming it. There. That's the fourth tone.
Oh, wow.
So, we're actually using all these tones. At least if you're speaking a somewhat melodic language like German or English. And it's just a matter of learning to use them actively and to avoid using the tones when it's not appropriate, like Europeans generally have this tendency to to raise the to raise the tone when asking a question. And you mustn't do that in Chinese because you're changing the meaning. So, it takes getting used to, but it's not at all impossible.
Oh, right.
But Chinese people also used to foreigners using bad tones. So it's not so bad.
Right. I guess it's just a one of these things where people don't really know about it, and so they fear that it's much harder than it really is or much bigger.
And Mandarin only has four tones. Cantonese and the other dialects have a lot more.
Yeah. So, I mean, just go for it. That that's kind of the the what we're going for. So, do you have any kind of ninja tips and tricks for people who want to learn Chinese. I guess the kind of the speaking and listening is kind of obvious, but are there any tips for maybe the writing or reading that you realize in a novel way?
Yeah. Yeah, I I spent a lot of actually several years just able to write like 600 to 800 characters. And I never got beyond that no matter how much I tried, because beyond that point, the characters all started to look the same.
Oh, right.
And that's that was a big problem. And not being able to learn more characters, I was also not able to to learn more vocabulary, to read more stuff, to write more stuff. So, that was a real problem.
And and then I encountered the the Heisig method for Japanese. And what it basically does is it tells you to split the characters into their component parts, because the characters are not like squiggles without any meaning on them. They consist of different parts, like about 200 distinct parts, just very few of them are regularly used. And then, you you can kind of create a story around these parts, which allow you to memorize even the the most difficult or the most complex characters. And with that approach, uh, it's a lot easier to learn characters. Now, originally, this was proposed by by Heisig or um, other authors who weren't so successful in promoting the method. But for Chinese, it took a bit of a time, but finally there are also some books using this method like the learning learning Chinese characters book or Reading and Writing Chinese Characters, both of these are very good books that use this method for Chinese.
Great.
And yeah, originally, I tried to do a bit by myself just looking at the characters and seeing what kind of parts there are, but it's really better to follow this kind of book that has a regular approach. Since with Japanese, you only have to learn a few of those or it's not really important if you don't know a character yet because you can still keep using hiragana and katakana.
But with Chinese, it makes a lot of sense to to go with a book that teaches them from from the most basic, the most simple combinations up to the more complex ones, and also keeping in mind how how common the characters are. Because you could be learning I don't know, thousands of characters and you want to be learning the ones that are the most common ones first, so that you can keep studying your textbook or whatever.
Right, focusing on frequency.
Yeah.
That's something we've we've heard quite a lot in in language learning recently. Um, for characters, how many characters would it take to be, let's say, able to read the newspaper or something, a kind of simple yet daily use text.
Uh, newspapers, well, the the difficult part are really the names. If you have a lot of Chinese politicians' names, then they may be using really rare characters. But beyond that, I think 3,000 is okay. I think the Chinese government even claims 2,200 would be enough. I'm not so sure about that.
Right. But can you from a can you from a a text deduce what is a name and what is not?
Yeah, that's that's pretty easy once you know the the characters around it.
Okay. So, even if you didn't know the politician's character, the character for the name, you'd still be able to say, oh, politician X or.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay. Well, that's a relief that you didn't know you didn't need to know every single character to kind of decryptyfy the the sentence or text indeed. All right. So, that's some some great Chinese language learning tips and tricks. And as I've been kind of saying a little loosely, I guess I'll make it official that I'll be learning Chinese as well.
Awesome.
Yeah, I've I've decided to go. I I still don't know if I want to learn Cantonese first or during or after or even at all, but, you know, I still have some time. I still have Russian this year and and Esperanto. As as well, so it's not going to be this year, but I'm definitely going to learn it.
And as as always on the on the website and and the blog and here on the podcast, I'm looking for new methods to optimize the language learning process, because I think that's the one strength we have as a technologically advanced people, I guess, is that we can always make it easier and faster to learn languages. And some methods are great and some are not so great. But today the the one we're going to talk about is is LearnYou.
Mhm.
And what exactly is LearnYou, because I could say LearnYou is a Chinese course. That's not quite covering it, does it?
It's quite different from regular Chinese courses. I mean, obviously, it teaches you Chinese, so that sense it's a course. But what it really does is, uh, it it creates the course as you go along.
So, this is a system that, of course, has a database of what you need to know for certain levels of competence. But then if you go along and you find something difficult, then the system will generate more and more exercises for this. Until you understand it. And once you understand it, it will present you with something new. And that keeps repeating. So if you understand something quickly, you'll quickly see something new. If you find something difficult, you'll get a lot of practice until you go on. So, it's really adapting to you personally as a learner.
Oh, great. And and how did you Let's go back quite a lot of time, I can imagine. How did you say, well, I don't think there's quite enough a good enough course to teach Chinese. How did that moment happen?
Well, I've always been a bit dissatisfied with the level of Chinese teaching, especially when I started out, a lot of it was very traditional, a lot of memorization, a lot of translation, a lot of just keep doing it over and over and you'll eventually get it attitude.
Um, so, yeah, nowadays, you can find Western kind of courses, communicative methods courses. But I keep seeing that people don't really end up with a good level after all that. I I'm taking some classes here locally in Berlin and also online at Dalarna University. And a lot of my classmates have studied Chinese for 10 years or the like, and they're still not really fluent in speaking. They still if they do a presentation, they read what they have to present. If they ask to talk about the topic freely, they're not really able to say much.
And I think that this is really the problem with the current approach is that you don't get enough opportunities to speak. And you don't get enough opportunities to use the language. You're also not get enough exposure to see the same words in different context to see how it might be used. Now this is this is quite fine for European languages if you see a word Italian lavora okay, to work. You know, you can use it pretty much the same as the English word to work. And that's fine. So, you just transfer your new knowledge and that's it.
But with Chinese, you need to see the same word in different contexts and to have a chance to to use it yourself, to try it out, and that's basically the the idea that I had for LearnYou is to give you the chance to to see the words and use them a lot and have a very active kind of language learning experience, not just reading text. You're always actively involved. If you're reading something, then LearnYou also asks you to translate it. Uh, if you're another exercise might be to translate something to Chinese, uh, or it might ask you to respond to a prompt in conversation, to have a conversation with the computer just to get you using the language, not just absorbing it passively.
Right. And that probably doesn't only happen with Chinese. That's that's classroom style learning for every language. I mean, if people go to German classes in Sweden, for instance, they might know how to read and have a pretty good vocabulary, but ask them to go to Berlin and speak to anyone and they'll be you know, they'll be out of practice or so you you incorporate that active approach from day one, that was part of the philosophy.
Yes, yes. And actually, I had a few a few teachers already asked me if they could use LearnYou with their students as a a way to to improve the classroom experience, because there's just no way if you have 20, 30 people in a class, there's no just no way you can give everyone the chance to use the language as much as they need to.
But what I would say is, it's not just applicable to the classroom, I've also found this with self-study courses that people are doing. And they don't present the words in different contexts. So, you have a text of I don't know, one page, if you're lucky. And after that, you have one or maybe two pages of vocabulary. And most of these words only appear once in the text. And then in the next in the next lesson, they may not appear at all. So, this is kind of okay for European languages, because you just do a mental equation. lavora is work. But for for Chinese, you really need to see them in different context, see them multiple times and review them often enough to keep the the knowledge alive.
And the brain is incredibly powerful. So if you show the brain enough examples, it will work out the connection of the word itself, right?
Mhm.
So that's incredible incredibly powerful. But one thing is having like a a vision and a an idea, but and I know you have a background in programming, so maybe that's not the hard part, but still creating a whole course from scratch, that must be a huge investment of time and effort. How did you just get started? I mean, what happened?
Uh, well, I was just finished my with my university degree and I was looking for something to do.
Right.
So I thought, okay, I'm going to change how people learn Chinese. And this was, of course, it was a lot of work. This was about a year ago. Uh, and so, of course, I spent a lot of time on that. I also invested a lot of money because I can't do everything by myself. I had to hire like Chinese native speakers, Chinese teachers, uh, people to record audio, uh, also to help me with other things I couldn't do around the site. But, yeah, being able to program is a big help. It allowed me to create most of the site. I mean, most of the innovative part of it by myself. And also, it allowed me to have a side job to keep making a bit of that money.
Yeah, I can see. And and what you just said, I find quite important as well because, uh, you know, when you're designing a a Chinese course, even if you've studied it for 10 years, you really need to be make sure that the content is perfect, right? So, having native people record the audio so the the the kind of the accents and the the the way it sounds is perfect, and also that all the text material is absolutely correct. I guess that must have been a a big kind of priority for you.
Of course, yeah. Uh, actually, one of the sites that inspired me to create LearnYou is Duolingo. Because they first had the idea to apply computers to language learning and try to try to guess what you might need to learn or guess how how far along you are, what what would give you a difficulty.
Uh, and there are a lot of things that I I don't like about their site. And one of the things is that they use machine voices.
Oh, really?
That's a big no-no for me. I mean, for some languages, they're kind of okay. But for others, they sound totally unnatural and I would never want to learn a language and have that kind of accent. Sounds like a computer, it's so off-putting for a conversation.
So, yes, my priority was to get everything recorded by native speakers and, yeah, also to record a lot of parts uh in the system. Whenever you do an exercise, no matter what kind of exercise, you will always hear the Chinese pronunciation afterwards. So that you're really burn the sound into your mind.
Right, and and keep learning that way. And you said it took a year to get from Right now, we're in the in the middle of the uh or nearly the end of the Indiegogo promotion campaign. But we you just kind of released publicly, do you call it a beta version or?
Yeah. I mean, it's um, it was a a closed beta. So we've been testing the site with testers for several months now.
And I wanted to get some more broad testing by people who may not have experienced learning Chinese, so that I could get different kind of bug reports and different kind of suggestions for improvement. So, yeah, um, and it's technically a closed beta, you need an invitation to participate. But we also said, if people support us on in this Indiegogo campaign, then of course, we're also going to let them use the site earlier. It's the least we can do.
Right. And there's already um a lesson on there, lesson one, right? Module one, what's the name of it?
Uh. Yeah, lesson one is the one that we have publicly to have like a proof of concept, like a demonstration for the ones who are not sure what kind of method LearnYou is using.
Uh, so, that's what you can do even without being invited. But if you're invited, then we have more lessons and we'll soon have a lot more.
Yeah, right. It's not this isn't a concept. You actually have a lot already done.
Yes.
And the Indiegogo campaign is a way to get more even more done.
Yes, definitely.
And faster. Because right now, I I believe the it is targeting the HSK level one.
Yes.
And your vision is to go all the way up to the highest level they target, right?
Yes, up to HSK6, which according to the Chinese government is C2.
That's very That's a very high level.
Yeah, they make it easy because they have these guidelines, like which vocabulary do you need to know, which kind of sentences do you need to be able to handle.
So, at least in terms of mastering that test, it will be possible. Now I can't promise that you'll be able to have conversations at level six because that also requires a lot of practice in the real world, having conversations with real people, not just the computer. But it's definitely going that way and, yeah, I think if we can do this much, it will be a really, really awesome thing.
Yeah. What are some of the struggles of making a computer teach us languages? Are there any limitations to the system itself or what what kind of struggles did you have when you were developing the the let's say the brain behind it?
The biggest struggle is that the computer doesn't really understand language. And so, there are some sentences that we know mean the same thing, but the computer won't know that.
So, if I have a an exercise where you're supposed to respond in conversation, then there may be dozens of ways that you could respond that all mean the same thing. And that's where we have to teach the computer, that's okay, no matter which way you respond, that it's going to be okay.
Right. So, you have to kind of manually input answer keys, so to speak.
Yes.
I I can imagine because otherwise, how would the computer know?
Yeah, I mean, getting one answer is is the easy part. You expect that, right? To to input, okay, the question is, how are you? The answer is, I'm fine. And then you have to think, which other responses could people give that would also be correct and that the computer should accept?
Right. That's the hard part. Yeah. And that's a lot of languages for I mean, a lot of answers for that particular question.
Yeah.
Fine, I'm all right, I'm well. All right, but you but you're still finding that a computer can boost or let's say empower language learning beyond that of a let's say a book or let's say a recorded course. The benefits are that it adapts to you, to the unique person. And are there any other benefits that we haven't discussed about having a computer kind of teach you a language?
It has infinite patience.
That's important.
I mean.
Compared to a tutor?
Um, especially when it comes to practicing pronunciation, of course, you can ask the computer to play a sound for you again and again and again and again. And if you keep making a stupid grammar mistake, it won't ever say you're stupid, it will just give you more exercises.
That's a very, very good bonus point there, I would say. Infinite patience on LearnYou. So, you can't break it even if you make a mistake a thousand times.
Yeah.
It'll still help you and try to get back to that particular word that you're having trouble with. All right, fantastic. And what what's it going to cost? That's a question that people are probably going to ask. What's it going to cost?
When the site is publicly available, it's going to be free.
All right.
Uh, at least the basic version, that is, you can study Chinese with it, and it will be free. And then, what we're hoping to do is to sell extra materials that are not essential, that you could also be getting elsewhere. For example, a book on learning Chinese or audio materials that you could take with you on your iPod, stuff like that.
So convenience mostly, actually.
Yes.
All right, or bonus features.
I think convenience sums it up pretty well.
Right.
If you want to conveniently learn Chinese, you probably want one of the extra materials.
Right. And also if you really like the course, once you've used it, to show your support, to show your appreciation.
Definitely.
I mean, I I do that all the time with tons of things where it's free to join, free to enter, but then they might have some kind of bonus thing or or premium membership or something. And I always chip in because of the value that I have been given up front. I think somebody called it the thank you economy is what we're living in, right? Where a lot of stuff is free to do, free to learn, free to whatever, but, you know, people thank you afterwards. And I think you've you've set up a a nice kind of framework for that with the LearnYou system. And if people don't like it, you know, they haven't spent anything on it.
Right.
Exactly. So.
This is another big difference to most language courses. There are a lot of companies out there who make money by selling you the course and then they don't care if you learn the language or not. Maybe they hope you don't learn the language and then you buy the next course that they publish.
Oh, no, I really dread to think about how many dollars have been spent on Rosetta Stone's courses and not led to any kind of ability in the language.
I don't know, there's a lot of people recommending Rosetta Stone, but they don't seem to be the people who are really good at languages.
They don't seem to speak the language. Well, yeah, I'm just that's a nightmare for me right there. But anyway, it's it it's been a a great pleasure to talk to you and as always. And I think there's about six days left of the Indiegogo campaign. And I really encourage people to go and sign up and support the cause. Firstly, because Judith is an amazing person. And secondly, because uh Chinese is a a big language, 800 million to a billion Mandarin speakers. I mean, you're really missing out on a lot if you're if you're at least not have a little bit of knowledge in Chinese.
So, go to uh go to Indiegogo now. I think the the they have a fancy short link for it, don't they? IGG.
Um.
Me.
Yes.
Slash at slash Chinese.
Yeah, or ik.me at Chinese.
Right. ik.me at Chinese. Or you can just go to learnyou.com.
Yeah, of course.
There's a big button on the front page.
Yeah, and there you can also try the first lesson to see what the system feels like.
Of course, that would be obvious. And LearnYou is uh Y U. Not uh why O U.
This is a play on words actually.
Yeah.
Yeah, um, because uh why you in Chinese will be pronounced Yu and it means language. So, it's like learn the language, learn Chinese language.
Ah. So, learn learn language or learn yourself language, so to speak. All right, fantastic. And you know, I I have been testing it a little bit and I I really like it so far. And you'll also put my review on the Indiegogo page. So, people can read that if they're interested in my little two cents. And I'm just uh looking forward to getting started for real next year.
Awesome.
That's about it. And I'll I'll send you lots of Skype messages about Chinese questions.
Yes, you do that.
But thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you for listening to the Actual Fluency podcast. For more information, be sure to check out actualfluency.com. Until next time, enjoy learning and have a great day.
Hey guys, thank you so much for listening to the end of this podcast. Before you go, I just want to thank today's show sponsor, Audible. And as a thank you to the listeners, Audible is currently offering a free audiobook to the Actual Fluency audience.
And basically you go to audibletrial.com/fluency. That's the link for Actual Fluency listeners. And at this URL you're given the option to sign up for a free 30-day trial and you can download any audiobook from 150,000 titles. They have multiple languages as well if you're practicing some of the bigger languages.
So, I would definitely encourage you to go and check out Audible. They are the biggest provider. Just be sure you uh you cancel your membership before 30 days are up. Then you will be given the book absolutely for free. It'll be tied to your account. So, there'll be no problem there. But that would be at audibletrial.com/fluency. And as always, thank you for listening, and I'll see you later.