Language: Myths about learning Mandarin Chinese with Von of "brain burn" fame

Back in November I participated in National Podcast Posting Month (NaPodPoMo), where crazy Podcasters like myself published an episode a day for a month. For this experiment I invited previous guests from all of the Geopats Podcast Network to come back on the podcast. I asked them to relisten to their original episode and record 2 things: an update on what’s changed for them since that episode and their impressions of that episode (most of which were a couple of years old). 

Most guests sent about 10-20 minutes of thoughts to me for this project but Von sent 50 minutes. Oh, this was all so interesting to hear. But for NaPodPoMo, I was only publishing mini episodes that were about 10 minutes long. So I used the “brain burn” clip of Von’s conversation that was about this length for NaPodPoMo and saved the rest of his language thoughts for later. Welcome to later.    

During this episode he shares:
 -how some people overthink learning Mandarin Chinese tones 
-how language learning as an adult can be easier than learning languages as a child
 -how Mandarin Chinese gets more difficult the more you learn it (exponentially so) 
-how he got his Chinese name through rather nefarious methods