Building an app to achieve native-level Chinese reading skills: Interview with Emmanuel Roche

I'm Learning Mandarin

My eBook: https://www.peakmandarin.com/free-ebook

Emmanuel's Full Chinese app: https://www.fullchinese.com/

My blog: imlearningmandarin.com

My guest on today’s podcast is computer scientist and educational technologist, Emmanuel Roche.

Emmanuel has more than 35 years of experience learning Chinese. He began his Mandarin odyssey in the late 80s, studying the language at university. But he quickly became frustrated at how inefficient teaching and learning methods were at the time.

Most of his classmates gave up, but Emmanuel didn’t. Instead, he developed a lifelong passion for Chinese, using his background in computer science to create technological solutions to make Mandarin acquisition a more efficient process.

In recent years he’s created an app called Full Chinese, which helps learners reach native-level proficiency in Chinese reading. It’s used by learners around the world and has even been integrated into Chinese Studies classrooms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

I chatted to Emmanuel about his challenges learning Chinese, the story behind his Full Chinese app and why he’s trying to bridge a divide between academic linguists and language learners.