Learning Chinese over 3½ Months | 12-Min Documentary

As we did with Spain and Brazil, we filmed a short documentary chronicling our experiences learning Chinese over a little more than three months. Vat also spent hundreds of hours doing timelapses, hyperlapses and videos to try to capture a different perspective on what life is like in China. We both felt that the China we saw wasn’t always portrayed that way in Western media, so we wanted to try to capture our experiences of the largest, oldest and possibly soon-to-be most powerful culture in the world.

For my Chinese readers, unfortunately, Vimeo is blocked in China. Never fear, we’ve made a special Chinese version of the video that we’ve uploaded to YouKu. This one has Chinese subtitles so it will make it a bit easier to follow along despite the many mistakes we made in Chinese. Click here to watch the Chinese edition.

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Since this is a more impressionistic video, rather than a fuller assessment of my actual Chinese, I’ll be uploading a little later two interviews I conducted in Chinese, one with John Pasden of Sinosplice.com (and previously, ChinesePod) and another with Olle Linge of Hacking Chinese. I’ll save a fuller and more technical analysis of my thoughts on learning Chinese until then, in the meantime, enjoy the show!