Speak Easy

With a business trip to Shanghai coming up, Elizabeth Day tests out free language learning apps to see how easy it is to master Mandarin

- Elizabeth Day

Mandarin Chinese is the world’s fastest-growing language. By 2050, it will be spoken by a majority of the global population and is increasingly essential for business travellers. And yet, for most of us, the closest we ever get to speaking it is when we order a chicken chow mein with a side order of crispy aromatic duck.

For years, the prospect of learning Mandarin, with its unfamiliar characters and baffling array of pronunciations, has simply been too daunting for most Westerners. We tend to rely on that lazy failsafe: the ready ability of educated foreigners to speak excellent English.

It’s also because, until relatively recently, there was a dearth of user-friendly apps for learning it. DuoLingo (duolingo.com), one of the most comprehensive language apps, which offers 68 different courses and has 150 million registered users, still hasn’t developed a Chinese course for English speakers because it’s too complicated to achieve this (although a Klingon course is currently in the incubation phase).

Still, with the prospect of a work trip to Shanghai approaching, I was keen to find out whether there were any other ways of learning the rudiments of Mandarin online. My first port of call was Pinyinpal (pinyinpal. com), which was developed by Chinese-American philanthropist Adeline Mah. Mah and her husband, Bob, are Scrabble obsessives and had been playing the online version, Words With Friends, for years.

Pinyinpal uses the same principles: it’s a two person game where the aim is to play words with the highest score. What makes it unique is that it transposes Mandarin characters into the Latin alphabet, so you’re being taught how to pronounce each word as you play.