Achieving a Near Native Chinese Accent with Professor Karen Chung (Podcast)
My eBook: https://www.peakmandarin.com/free-ebook
Links:
Karen's Ted Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQEWEPIHLzQ
My Roadmap to Learning Mandarin Tones: http://imlearningmandarin.com/2022/02/12/its-never-too-late-to-learn-chinese-tones-heres-how/
On today’s podcast, I chat with a very distinguished guest. Someone who has designed a technique she believes can help learners of any language achieve near native accents.
Karen Chung from the USA has lived in Taiwan for more than 30 years and for most of that time has worked as a linguistics professor at the National Taiwan University.
In 2018 a Ted Talk which she delivered in flawless Mandarin received over a million views and brought her methods to the attention of a large international audience.
In the video she explains her accent training technique which she calls the echo method. The method which is based on her own learning experiences takes advantage of our echoic memory.
First we listen to a sentence or phrase in our target language, waiting for the audio to replay or echo in our minds, before finally mimicking it out loud. Doing it this way allows us to mimic native speech much more closely than conventional listen and repeat methods.
In this podcast, we explore her own language learning journey, how she learned Mandarin to such a high level and why she disagrees with conventional language learning opinion which argues accents don’t matter as long as we can more or less make ourselves understood.
She also kindly agreed to give me a brief demonstration of her method to help improve my own Mandarin accent.
I'm Learning Mandarin
I'm Learning Mandarin is a podcast that dives deep into the questions that matter to Chinese learners. Host, Mischa Wilmers, talks to the world's leading scholars and draws on his experience of self-studying the language to fluency.
Visit the Im Learning Mandarin blog. Popular posts include:
Your Ultimate Guide To Learning Chinese Tones: https://imlearningmandarin.com/2024/09/16/its-never-too-late-to-learn-chinese-tones-heres-how/
How Long Does It Take To Learn Mandarin: https://imlearningmandarin.com/2024/09/09/reality-check-can-you-actually-master-mandarin-in-six-months/
- No. of episodes: 97
- Latest episode: 2025-06-19
- Education Language Learning
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