Former NASA employee applies engineering approach to Mandarin learning

I'm Learning Mandarin

Links:

Tones Mechanic newsletter: imlearningmandarin.com

Outlier Linguistics: https://www.outlier-linguistics.com/

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Ash Henson is the co-founder of Outlier Linguistics, a company dedicated to creating tools and courses that make learning Chinese and other languages more effective and engaging.

Outlier specialise in facilitating the language learning process by breaking down the complexities of the language, including Chinese characters.

And Ash is particularly well placed to do this. He holds a PhD in Chinese Palaeography and Phonology from National Taiwan Normal University, with a specialisation in the study of ancient writing systems.

Initially, he began his career as an electrical engineer and since then he has consistently sought to apply this engineering mindset to the study of languages.

In this interview, I chat with Ash about his novel approaches to learning characters and Mandarin tones.

I began by exploring his unusual background working as an engineer for NASA and how this influenced his learning approach.