Charles Chu, thanks for this — it’s given me some great ideas for how to accelerate my Mandarin practice. It’s bizarre, I grew up multilingual, studied languages at uni here in the UK and still speak Italian daily. I speak Spanish well once I get in my stride but trying to get ahead in Mandarin has been a struggle. I always knew that the key was to expose myself to the language more but equated that with the jumping on a plane and spending dedicated time with native speakers — fine when I was a hop skip and jump away from the med and could spend a week or two in Spain or Italy without thinking about it (no wife or kids either) — but obviously not now. Time to dig out a few films methinks…