In this episode of The Learner Journals, Tom speaks with Alex, also known as “The Phenom”, about how language learning fits into a life already full of learning, from rowing and coding to French and Mandarin.

Alex’s Mandarin journey began through work. After being sent to factories in China with very little Mandarin, he quickly saw how powerful even a basic introduction could be. A few simple sentences helped people open up, ask him questions, and treat him differently. Later, seeing how machine-translated emails stripped away the politeness and nuance from Chinese made him realise how much gets lost when you cannot understand a language directly.

Alex talks about learning French first, partly out of spite, which is probably one of the more honest motivations ever admitted on a language podcast. But through French, he discovered how speaking someone’s native language lets you meet a more genuine version of them.

His Mandarin routine is built around reading, character recognition, one-to-one lessons, and finding input that is actually interesting. He uses graded readers like Mandarin Companion, studies characters through Mandarin Blueprint and Anki, and prefers content that feels like part of life rather than homework. His current focus is improving listening, which he admits is his weakest area.

The conversation covers why characters are less scary once you break them down, why reading helps grammar stick, why embarrassment is unavoidable, why boring sentence drills are basically linguistic punishment, and why the best learning method is usually the one you can keep doing without wanting to throw yourself into the sea.

Alex’s biggest advice is simple: don’t avoid characters, don’t force yourself through boring material forever, and find things you genuinely care about. Attack the language from as many angles as possible until something sticks.

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