How I’m learning Mandarin in 2026: My Daily Routine in Taipei

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Way back in 2012, I announced one of the most followed and discussed projects on this blog, of finally taking on Mandarin. It was an intensive 3 months, all taking place in Taiwan, followed by 2 months of travelling through mainland China. At the end of it, my level was independently evaluated to be around B1 (lower intermediate) spoken level (I didn't have a reading aspect to the project).

If you're curious about how that project turned out to be more controversial than I expected and what I did wrong to make it more stressful than it could have been, I discussed it in detail in this recent podcast episode:

But ultimately, since I had that lower-intermediate spoken Mandarin, I was able to independently travel through China, making friends and having various adventures such as learning Kung Fu in a fishing village, and interviewing a native speaker TV presenter. So, it was a result that I was proud of!

But in the years since, there has only been one stretch where I was intensively working on getting it back to that level with intensive online lessons and other revision; in the months around when I was co-writing Language Hacking Mandarin. Other than that, I've only really used the language in very brief exchanges in passing at language exchange events. It's a pity, since I did genuinely want Mandarin to be among my “permanent” maintenance languages, but it's continued to slip away from me over the years.

Returning to Taipei to Learn Mandarin

This is why I'm happy to report that I'm back in the same city I began my Mandarin journey in, 14 years ago!

For a while, I wasn't sure when I'd get back into prioritising Mandarin, but right before this, I was travelling through Malaysia for the first two months of the year, and I met so many of the Chinese diaspora living there, as well as many Chinese tourists, that it inspired me to shift my attention away from Malay back to Mandarin again. I was loving getting back into the language so much, that dedicating two months in a completely Mandarin speaking country felt like the natural next step.

My daily learning routine

Since I arrived in Taipei, I've had a pretty-much daily routine of starting my day in a café studying a Chinese Grammar book (picking this one, because it has good explanations and it makes allowances for Taiwanese Mandarin, while using both simplified and traditional characters in its examples, even though it's still focused mainly on mainland Chinese), then going for a run (I've lost 25kg/55lb since my peak weight during the pandemic, but I still have work to do, so I'm running for over an hour and a half every day here).

Note that I do not recommend absolute beginners start with grammar books! But because I had already reached intermediate level, I'm finding that the biggest problem I've to solve, other than remembering vocab, is to have more natural sounding sentences, so it's the right time for me to make grammar a more central focus.

Speaking of vocabulary, in the afternoon, I study my Anki decks. I mainly focus on the ones I originally created in 2012, since I put a massive amount of effort into them by tracking every single new word that came up in my in-person language lessons back then! I had to dig them out of a really old backup I made of an old computer, and even needed to go the extra mile to convert them to modern Anki since the application has changed so much over the years to not be able to open a 14-year-old file anymore, but it's been worth it, since the vocab I made back then is most relevant to the kinds of conversations I typically have. Once I'm on top of those, I'll switch to public decks.

Almost every day, I have online language lessons (these days, I typically recommend people use Preply to find their teachers. Obviously, since language learning is my business I can afford to have a teacher several times a week, but if you want to save money this AI conversation tool is a good much cheaper alternative). These regular classes (with different teachers for variety), is giving me some well-needed momentum and helping me push through the rusty feeling of not having used the language in a while.

Every other evening I go to a social event with locals, and on the way there on the metro, I listen to ChineseClass101's podcast. Initially I was using their advanced beginner level, but I'm more comfortable now with their lower intermediate options.

At language events (that I typically find on meetup.com and there's loads of them in an international city like Taipei) I'm still struggling to join in on Mandarin conversations because the noisy environment and range of skill levels with many natives not used to adjusting for foreigners, makes it a little out of reach. Other language events I've been at over the years are “standing”, so you can find individuals to converse with, but the ones here are more likely “sit down” events, where you are in a big group of people. So I've had to back out after 30 or so minutes and switch to one of my other languages for people who want to practise Spanish, French etc. But I'm sure that soon I'll find the right balance, especially as I make progress in my daily lessons, and be able to join in on the conversations more confidently.

My Upcoming Taiwan Deep Travel Project

While in Taipei, you can sometimes find someone who speaks some English, if you want to order food or do various other things. But it happens a lot less than you would think. I've had to send a package, buy various items, order in multiple restaurants and cafés etc. entirely in Mandarin, with no switching to English when they saw me struggling, except in very specific places where someone happens to have some English.

I knew what I was in for already on day one, when I was tired from a really early flight and just wanted an espresso and the barista at a Starbucks didn't understand me! I had to dig out “nóngsuō kāfēi” from my tired brain to be able to actually order it!

This is actually great because it takes away any temptation to be lazy and just do everything in English here, like you can in some other major international cities. I'm sure there are plenty of expats who have found the right parts of town and specific restaurants where you can always interact with people in English, but I intentionally haven't found myself in those places often.

But to make it more interesting, I'm going to spend a few weeks travelling the rest of the country (something I didn't get to do except for one quick trip last time), where I'm sure I'll have even less of a temptation to not use my Mandarin.

This upcoming trip is motivating me to keep up the pace of the routine I outlined above, so that I'll be even more ready when I'm exploring the rest of the country. That style of deep travel outside of major hubs is something I've been more interested in recent years, with huge projects to visit every state of Brazil, all 48 contiguous states of the US, or every province of South Korea. It's about time I saw beyond Taipei in Taiwan!

Back after a break: Blogging in the age of AI slop

That's my update for Mandarin! If you're curious for more regular updates, I post more often on my travel and on my language learning Instagram accounts. If I have a specific important blog post like this, I'll mention it on Instagram, and that's the best place to leave your comments!

It's actually been a really long while since I posted on this blog. For ages, I had a big team of writers doing regular posts to give very specific language learning tips that people were actively searching for, and for 2013-2023 that became the main focus of blog articles, but we've eased off on such posts since Google were just taking my advice and putting it in their AI snippet, taking the traffic away and making it so I couldn't pay the writing team for the hard work they were doing.

I might use AI for rephrasing and grammar correction suggestions, but I'll still be writing every word of the articles myself, so you know they are truly sourced from an actual human and not regurgitated AI slop.

I'll still give specific tips, like I did in this post, but I'm going to return more to the type of blog posts I had in the original years (2009-2013) of this blog, of me sharing my specific language and travel adventures in a way that isn't quite answering a question you'd ask on Google. In the age of AI, I think we need more personal experiences of actual humans in the world… even though I know that various bots are reading this and using it to train their models regardless…