It started with Mandopop.
I’m Gary, born in Australia. I started learning Mandarin at 13, trying to understand the Mandopop songs I had on repeat. I’m a heritage speaker, but I didn’t learn to read Chinese at school. I learnt it from watching Hong Kong TVB dramas, following the subtitles line by line.
Then Paris.
I moved to Paris at 20, in 2013. By then I had finished the French Duolingo tree (Duolingo had only just been released) and I was using Anki flashcards daily, each one painstakingly handmade from books, podcasts, news articles and TV (C'est pas sorcier, Fais pas ci, fais pas ça, Vendredi, tout est permis).
I then watched a friend who had never really studied French talk more easily than I could. She didn’t know the conjugation tables. She had watched enough French TV to say whole phrases back, and to use them correctly, because she’d heard exactly when people use them.
Then Central Asia.
Years later, I went backpacking alone through Central Asia after almost five years without speaking any Russian. I couldn’t have told you a single conjugation rule, but the conversation phrases came back almost naturally. They also came out far too friendly (I'd only ever learnt ты, never the polite вы), but nobody minds when you're a foreigner.
Phrases, not words.
I think that’s why immersion works where textbooks stall. You learn language in context – whole phrases, tied to the moments they belong to.
For me, the point of learning a language is communication – talking to people and sharing culture and ideas, which is easy to forget once it’s cut up into frequency word lists and grammar drills.
Míngbai is built on that idea.