Nine Years Ago Joshua Ogden-Davis left graduate school in Texas, moved to China and taught himself Chinese. He is now a Mandarin Chinese Translator, does audio and video production in multiple languages, and is a Puppeteer. In this Changing Scripts podcast episode we dig into Josh’s fuller language story, including this switch from English to Mandarin Chinese as well as his experiences with Spanish, German and English from his beforetime.
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​We learn that although Josh was good at and liked learning aspects of grammatical knowledge growing up, it was not until he was able to simultaneously learn and immediately use Mandarin Chinese that he understood the importance of motivation, activation and fluency over accuracy. Josh shares his hilarious Chinese language experiences from taxi rides where he was asked some pretty intimate details about his genitalia AND his own appearance on a local Chinese dating show. He admits that he spends his time in the space in between English and Chinese languages and ponders if that could be called a “third culture language (TCL)”. I say hell yea, let’s do this

In this episode we chat with Lotta, a Finnish college student who lived in Shanghai, China between High School and University. During part of that time she took intensive Chinese language courses. Lotta has continued with her Chinese language learning even after returning to Finland by using TV shows and other media until she can take more language classes at her university.
Lotta shares with us her intensive Mandarin Chinese classroom experience in Shanghai, how she used the language outside of the classroom and how Mandarin Chinese compares to the handful of other languages she has learned and used in her life thus far. Lotta’s mother, Pia, was a guest on the Expat Rewind Podcast last year, where shared her first impressions of Shanghai via a blog post she wrote after moving here from Finland. Hi Pia!