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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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…
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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 a memoir about Mr. Yang (Yang Zhenning), an elderly man who loved driving well into his eighties, and the writer (his wife) who eventually took over behind the wheel. It's full of small, vivid moments: driving on the wrong side of the road in Hong Kong, an air conditioner that died mid-mountain on a sweltering day, a terrifying near-miss on the edge of a cliff on Tai Mo Shan, and a stubborn old man who never seemed to worry about any of it. But underneath the close calls and the laughs, there's something quieter going on — about getting…
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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 episode is about one of the most extraordinary athletes of our time — Shohei Ohtani. But we're not starting with his record-breaking stats or his World Series moments. We're going back much further than that — to a quiet town in Iwate, Japan, where a young boy would throw a baseball against a wall for hours, just to hear it bounce back. This story is told in natural, flowing Chinese, and it's a beautiful one. Let's get into it. - Rui & Simeng ************************************************************ Support Our Podcast Support Our Podcast →…
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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 episode is about one of the most extraordinary athletes of our time — Shohei Ohtani. But we're not starting with his record-breaking stats or his World Series moments. We're going back much further than that — to a quiet town in Iwate, Japan, where a young boy would throw a baseball against a wall for hours, just to hear it bounce back. This story is told in natural, flowing Chinese, and it's a beautiful one. Let's get into it. - Rui & Simeng ************************************************************ Support Our Podcast Support Our Podcast →…
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 →