About this site

Hi there, and welcome to mandarin.joost.at. My name is Joost, and in late 2022 I decided I would like to learn Mandarin/Chinese.

I wanted to be able to pratice my list of Chinese words in an easy and low-friction way, so that is why I built this site.

I guess the thing that sets this site apart from other (and better) reference material for learning Chineses is that I have included my personal notes for remembering the characters.

Why?

Honestly, it is all Naomi Wu's fault. Naomi is a maker from Shenzhen who is vocal about a number of things I care about, and it is refreshing to get the unfiltered vantage point of a Chinese citizen.

We don"t have a lot of access to such authentic Chinese voices. Most of our reporting is filtered through a Western vantage point after all. There are obviously a lot of Chinese people out there, but they tend to speak Chinese.

So I decided I would try to learn their language, so that in turn I could could learn more about China and its people.

Isn't China bad though?

There is a line in this great song by The Goats that says:

We don't hate the people, but the goverment's a drag

If you have a hot take that the CCP is not a force for good, please save it. I fail to see how that is relevant when learning a langauge that is spoken by a billion people.

Did you find a mistake?

If you see something that needs improvement, the source code of this website is available on Github. Pull requests welcome!