About RealTime Mandarin

RealTime Mandarin

RealTime Mandarin is an English-language weekly newsletter that teaches contemporary Mandarin through current Chinese news, written by Andrew Methven. It began in February 2021 as Slow Chinese, launched during Covid to help advanced learners maintain their Mandarin, and was relaunched as RealTime Mandarin in April 2024. Each Saturday edition takes one major China news story, explains it in English and breaks down its key words, idioms and internet slang, with curated links to Chinese sources, and the newsletter has grown to more than 12,000 subscribers. A paid tier, RealTime Mandarin+, adds a podcast and further learning resources, and Methven has extended the project into courses, including a Mandarin News Mastery system and a Chinese News Bootcamp run with Outlier Linguistics. Methven, a graduate of SOAS University of London with an MA in Chinese-English translation and linguistics and a China-focused business career, writes from the United Kingdom; the newsletter's subject, however, is the living language of mainland China's news and internet.

Andrew Methven's long road to Chinese

Methven's route to Mandarin was, by his own account, an unlikely one. Interviewed by the Business Confucius Institute at the University of Leeds, he recalled that at school he "wasn't a language person at all" — he received a D in French and was not considered good enough to take German at GCSE. His journey began in 2002, when he set off travelling over land from Waterloo intending to stay in China for two or three months; the trip became a year, including time teaching English and extensive travel around mainland China with, as he put it, a backpack and not much else. Hitching lifts and staying in people's houses forced him to learn enough Chinese to get by, and his Chinese kept improving in those practical situations. After further time in South East Asia, Australia and Taiwan, and back in London, he experimented with Arabic and Russian before committing to Chinese; four years after first setting off, he completed a master's degree in Chinese-English Translation and Linguistics at SOAS. A podcast profile adds that his original degree was in planetary science. At SOAS he met Chinese entrepreneurs and joined their British-based startup, at a time when big Chinese companies were investing in the UK, beginning a China-focused career in business in which he has used his Chinese daily with colleagues and clients.

Born in lockdown: Slow Chinese

The newsletter began as a remedy for a problem Methven felt himself. Even as an advanced learner who used Chinese every day, he found his active language shrinking during the Covid lockdowns, when he was no longer travelling or going into London for meetings. He responded with a daily reading regime, getting up earlier — normally at about 5:30 a.m., in what had been his commuting time — and consuming China news in both English and Chinese. There was always, he found, a new word, idiom, colloquial phrase, internet word or concept to learn, and these often reflected what was going on in China today. In February 2021 he turned those notes into the Slow Chinese newsletter, reasoning that other learners would value seeing them arrive in their inbox every week: a resource based around current affairs that kept readers up to speed with events while highlighting the new language the news contained. It began with an initial list of 50 readers. The name expressed the method: taking the time to understand at a deeper level, noticing when the same phrases popped up again and again as a sign that they reflected a common concept or mood.

How an edition works

RealTime Mandarin's format has remained consistent from its Slow Chinese origins. Each week Methven picks one major news story — in his description of the method, he draws from multiple sources, explains the story in English first, and then gives readers curated links in Chinese, so they do not have to do the hard work of finding interesting material to read. The language teaching is built around the phrases the story throws up: new and prevalent terms that often have no dictionary definition yet, which he looks up in both English and Chinese, cross-references and works out a translation for himself. The Leeds interview gives characteristic examples: 坟头蹦迪 (féntóu bèngdí), literally "tomb mound dancing", a phrase for a dance performance at a rural funeral that in internet language had come to mean "that's really inappropriate", and which could not be found in any Chinese-English dictionary; and 内卷 (nèi juǎn), officially rendered "involution", which Methven translated as "unhealthy competition". Later editions treated 割韭菜 (gē jiǔcài), "leek cutting", for big corporates taking advantage of ordinary consumers — illustrated by a story about consumers feeling ripped off by Chinese New Year cinema ticket prices — and the idiom 救命稻草 (jiùmìngdàocǎo), "lifesaving straw", for a pointless or futile activity. Gaming words crossing into social media and politics, and farming and workplace slang, were among the themed editions the newsletter showcased.

From Slow Chinese to RealTime Mandarin

In April 2024 the newsletter was relaunched under the name RealTime Mandarin. The Leeds Business Confucius Institute, updating its profile, explained that the new name better conveyed the essence of the content: learning contemporary Chinese through current affairs as they happen. The rebrand kept the Saturday cadence, the single-story format and the focus on the language of the moment, while presenting the project for what it had become — a standing resource for China watchers as much as for language learners. Outlier Linguistics describes Methven as the founder and author of "the RealTime Mandarin newsletter, a free weekly resource which helps over 12,000 China watchers and language learners keep up to date with the latest language trends in China", and Methven himself has written of editions going out to more than 12,300 Mandarin enthusiasts. The growth from 50 initial readers to a five-figure audience was achieved without changing the core proposition settled in lockdown: one story a week, read slowly and closely, in both languages.

The paid tier, membership and community

Alongside the free Saturday newsletter, Methven built a membership around the project. A review by LTL Language School records the membership pricing at $15 per month or $120 per year, with the free membership giving access to the weekly Saturday email and the paid service adding substantially more content. In the Slow Chinese era the paid tier was organised as RealTime Mandarin+ — adding a podcast and learning resources to the newsletter — and Methven's user's guide described the membership as turning the free content into a language-learning tool built on three pillars: native audio, original resources and an engaged community, with a monthly members' forum. The guide cited a community of more than 250 members, all of whom, he wrote, had faced the same problem of taking their Chinese to the next level. Testimonials collected for the membership included one from Jeremy Goldkorn, editor-in-chief of SupChina, who called Methven's newsletter and podcast "the best and most efficient way I have found to maintain my Chinese reading abilities and learn new idiomatic language", adding that because it was drawn from Chinese media reports and online language, it was also an excellent method of keeping up with current events as Chinese people were reading about them.

Courses: news mastery and bootcamp

The newsletter method has been formalised into teaching products. Outlier Linguistics markets Methven's Mandarin News Mastery course — a more advanced programme, in its second year, which it says has helped over 100 upper-intermediate and advanced Mandarin learners dramatically improve their Chinese news reading skills and speed — and its Chinese News Bootcamp, an intensive five-week course helping intermediate students make the leap from graded readers into authentic news, taught by Methven. Outlier describes his system as developed specifically for non-native speakers to get up and running with the news as quickly as possible, including techniques for choosing level-appropriate articles and even for skimming. Methven has explained the underlying technique as "narrow reading": reading multiple articles about the same topic or theme, which is exactly how RealTime Mandarin itself works, since every week takes one major news story and reads around it deeply. His advice to learners is notably modest in scale: commit to five to ten minutes a day, put it in the diary as the first thing each morning, and let the small commitment survive busy weeks — five minutes, he writes, often becomes ten, twenty, even thirty.

Why the news, and why in Chinese

Underlying the project is a frustration Methven described to the Leeds interviewers: when he began reading more extensively about China, English-language coverage rarely referenced its Chinese-language sources. When Jack Ma delivered his speech at the Bund Summit in Shanghai in October 2020, Methven's first reaction was to want to read what Ma had actually said — but none of the articles linked to the original text, and finding it took searching. "It's easier to scan the news in English," he said, "but you want the option of also seeing it in Chinese if you want to." RealTime Mandarin is built to supply exactly that option, curating the Chinese links its readers would otherwise have to hunt for. Methven also argues that language is a leading indicator of social change: expressions begin on social media and become everyday language, gaming vocabulary crosses into internet speech, and digging into a phrase's origins reveals aspects of culture that headline coverage misses. The newsletter's accountability — a new edition expected every Saturday morning — turned his private reading discipline into, in his words, a responsibility he really enjoyed, which left him more on top of events in China and, as he put it, helped him get his Chinese language back.

Beyond the newsletter

Methven's work around the newsletter extends into advocacy for Chinese-language skills in Britain. Along with H-J Colston he was named co-chair of the Association for Speakers of Chinese as a Second Language (Chinese-Speakers), which aims to raise awareness of the value of speaking Chinese as a second language and to promote opportunities for qualified non-native speakers. His advice to new graduates of Chinese, given in the Leeds profile, was a "Chinese plus" strategy: not language alone, as he had first pursued it, but language combined with expertise in an area of policy, a region, or a skill such as accounting, investment or law. He has discussed the project in podcast interviews, including The Negotiation podcast, where he traced his path from planetary science graduate to newsletter author and spoke about the lack of resources and opportunities for Chinese learners in the UK and other Western countries, and a Language Podcast interview about learning Chinese through chunks, news and internet slang. His own recommended reading, listed by the Leeds institute, spans English-language sources such as Sinocism, Trivium, SupChina, Foreign Affairs and What's On Weibo, and Chinese sources including Sohu and Weibo — the same mixed diet of sources from which each week's edition is assembled.

Place among China newsletters

RealTime Mandarin occupies a distinctive position in the English-language China media landscape: it is simultaneously a China news briefing and a language course, read both by learners maintaining advanced Mandarin and by China watchers who want the language trends behind the headlines. Its longevity — weekly since February 2021, through a rebrand, to an audience of more than 12,000 — rests on a deliberately narrow formula executed consistently: one major story, explained in English, unpacked phrase by phrase, with the Chinese sources linked for readers who want to go further. In a field of China newsletters that compete on analysis, access or translation volume, RealTime Mandarin's claim is different and verifiable in every edition: that the fastest way to understand what is happening in China is to slow down and read its language as it is actually being used.