Learning Chinese Through Stories
Story episodes paired with all-Chinese vocabulary explanations, across five levels.
- LevelFor beginners · For intermediate · For advanced
- PriceFree with a paid tier
- Made forFor learners
- Episodes here5 newest
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Welcome to 听故事说中文, the podcast where stories come alive to help you improve your Chinese language proficiency and cultural competency. Today's story is about Cai Lei, a man who was diagnosed with ALS — known in Chinese as 渐冻症(jiàn dòng zhèng), literally "the freezing disease" — and chose not to quietly disappear. Before his diagnosis, he was a successful businessman. Afterward, he became something harder to define: a patient who threw himself into funding research, building platforms, pushing policy, and demanding that the world pay attention to a disease it had largely ignored. It's a story about what it looks like to face the unfaceable — not with grace, but with grit. - Rui & Simeng…
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Welcome to 听故事说中文, the podcast where stories come alive to help you improve your Chinese language proficiency and cultural competency. Today's story is about a word that's been quietly spreading across the Chinese internet — 登. It's a slang term that's hard to translate directly, but you'll recognize the type of person it describes: someone who leans on their experience or status to tell others what to do, who'd rather lecture than listen, and who turns a conversation into a one-way street. It's not really about age. Plenty of young people get teased for having 登味 too — those moments when we catch ourselves being a little too rigid, or judging others by our own standards without realizing…
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Welcome to 听故事说中文, the podcast where stories come alive to help you improve your Chinese language proficiency and cultural competency. Today's story is about a word that's been quietly spreading across the Chinese internet — 登. It's a slang term that's hard to translate directly, but you'll recognize the type of person it describes: someone who leans on their experience or status to tell others what to do, who'd rather lecture than listen, and who turns a conversation into a one-way street. It's not really about age. Plenty of young people get teased for having 登味 too — those moments when we catch ourselves being a little too rigid, or judging others by our own standards without realizing…
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Welcome to 听故事说中文, the podcast where stories come alive to help you improve your Chinese language proficiency and cultural competency. Today's story is about Cai Lei, a man who was diagnosed with ALS — known in Chinese as 渐冻症(jiàn dòng zhèng), literally "the freezing disease" — and chose not to quietly disappear. Before his diagnosis, he was a successful businessman. Afterward, he became something harder to define: a patient who threw himself into funding research, building platforms, pushing policy, and demanding that the world pay attention to a disease it had largely ignored. It's a story about what it looks like to face the unfaceable — not with grace, but with grit. - Rui & Simeng…
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In this week's story walkthrough, we meet 杨先生 — a man who loved driving so much that he didn't hand over the keys until he was 85. Through a series of close calls on Hong Kong's narrow mountain passes, a near-disaster on 大帽山, and an ancient car that refused to retire, we get a window into a relationship built on adventure, laughter, and the kind of quiet courage that comes from trusting someone completely. This walkthrough explores the story entirely in Chinese. Along the way, you'll pick up vocabulary like 如履薄冰, 硬着头皮, 心有余悸, and 初生牛犊不怕虎 — all in the context of real, memorable moments that make them easy to remember. 如履薄冰 — A one-lane road, no guardrails, a sheer drop on one side. No room to…
What it is
Each story comes with a companion episode where the hosts unpack the key words and phrases in Chinese, so you get input and consolidation without leaving the language, from Beginning through Superior. The level range makes it one of the few learner podcasts you can stay with for years. Podcast audio is free; transcripts, worksheets and speaking cohorts are paid, and the recording quality varies across the older catalogue.
Episodes are played straight from the publisher's feed — nothing is hosted here, and the five newest are whatever the feed served when this page was last built. All Chinese (Mandarin) podcasts →