https://ethan-cope.github.io/tags/china/ Recent content in china on Hey, I'm Ethan. Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Sat, 25 Jul 2026 10:53:53 -0700 https://ethan-cope.github.io/posts/mandarin/ Sat, 25 Jul 2026 10:53:53 -0700 https://ethan-cope.github.io/posts/mandarin/ View from a pagoda in Suzhou’s Humble Administrator’s Garden Three weeks before my trip to Shanghai, it occurred to me that I spoke exactly zero Mandarin. Trying to rectify this in a time crunch proved harder than I thought. The logical thing to do is start with a language course, right? Well, it turns out that most language courses try to teach the whole language. They often want you to understand the grammar, and lay a solid foundation to build towards full fluency.