Q&A interview with FluentFlix founder Alan Park

I started learning Chinese during my first semester of college. I just wanted to try something new, and I knew that knowing Chinese would be useful in a world where China was becoming increasingly important. However, I soon realized it wasn’t a walk in the park. I still remember going through tingxie’s (listening dictations) where I had no idea what was being said. But then I decided to go to China and fell in love with learning Chinese. I think it’s really empowering to go to China and feel a whole new world opening up to you.

Chinese “in the wild” refers to authentic Chinese content, ie. Chinese as it’s actually used in real life. For the majority of the study content we feature in our blog, we make an effort to use examples curated directly from popular Chinese news and social networking sites.

It’s important for Chinese learners to learn from “in the wild” content for several reasons:

First, “in the wild” content often contains high frequency vocabulary, and learners can be more confident that the words they are learning are actually used.   

Second, “in the wild” content sounds more natural than artifically made content, as it’s the way that people actually communicate. 

Third, “in the wild” content usually shows experiences that are more real, interesting, and memorable. Also, authentic content is key for learning about Chinese culture — and as we know, understanding the culture is just as important as understanding the language, if you want to really communicate well.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t a role for scripted content. For true beginners, scripted content is probably still necessary to learn the fundamentals. But the earlier learners can “graduate” to interesting, authentic content, the more motivated they’ll be to continue exploring Chinese.

To me, learning a language is like entrepreneurship or exercising.

It’s like entrepreneurship because it’s a series of experiments. Through the experiments, you find out what’s right, and what’s wrong, and after you remove all the mistakes, you’ll end up sounding fluent. 

People say that some individuals are “naturally good” at learning languages, but I don’t believe that. I think some people have personalities that are better suited for learning languages (eg. they’re open to feedback, not afraid of embarrassing themselves) and they reinforce it with habits (eg. always seeking feedback and reviewing past mistakes) that set themselves up for success.

I think being feedback oriented helps learners distance themselves from the inevitable mistakes and embarrassments that when speaking Chinese. After all, if you make a mistake for the first time, then isn’t it just sheer luck that you hadn’t made it until now? Nothing to be embarrassed about! Just don’t make it again. 🙂

Language learning is also a lot like exercise because a it’s about intensity. I think the question “How long have you been studying Chinese?” is often not a good question, because what matters is how intensely you learned the language. I’ve studied Chinese for 10+ years, but 80% of my progress was probably in just a few of those years. It’s really not about how much time you were in the gym, but about how much it hurt while you were doing your last few reps.

I loved learning Chinese through authentic content like music videos and movies. And I knew a lot of other language learners did too.

But I thought that the experience was imperfect – I thought it was more painful and required more willpower than was necessary. Finding content that was interesting to me and suited to my level was difficult. Trying to watch and study a video at the same time was painful. Keeping track of the words I was learning and reviewing them properly was a big chore. 

I thought there had to be a better way so I started FluentFlix.

What a hard question!

One of my favorites is this video clip we call “Drama at the Photocopier.” It’s from the popular Chinese drama “Dulala” and in this scene basically Office Space meets Mean Girls. It’s hilarious — I guarantee that you won’t forget the scene, and I’m sure that this will make it easier to remember any words you learn from the video.

Please excuse the shameless plug, but we run a popular Twitter account (@fluentflix) where we tweet multiple words, phrases, and chengyus daily, with accompanying example sentences.  We are well on our way to 1,000 followers, so we welcome any readers to follow us for great study content!  We are also blogging away, featuring study material curated directly from Weibo, timely or topical chengyus, interviews of Chinese learners, and other content of interest for Chinese learners.  Leave us a comment, we’d love to hear what you think!