Hm… I’m not sure if I did. I intended to, but I might have forgotten it or considered it unimportant since most listeners would not be studying Chinese. In any case, I’ve talked about this a lot here!

Did you mention which tonal error you made the first two years? (Listened while Skrittering, so might have missed it).

If not, could you evolve a little bit?

Thanks for sharing both your experience (I have experienced the same thing several times) and the book recommendation. I think that “brain overload” is something overlooked in language learning and teaching in general, so reading the book might give me more ideas on how to connect the two topics.

i think I have a lot to learn about audio/podcasts/interviews, but I would definitely like to focus more on audio in the future. Glad you liked it! 🙂

Thanks, glad you liked it!

Then I really listened many many times to the difference and really noticed the different vowel sounds. It took about 2 weeks for this to snap into focus after I noticed it. Once I could hear that very well, I could finally produce the sound and know when I was right. This was quick – maybe 30 minutes (not perfect, but distinguishable as the correct sound). Then I also became much much better at self-correcting if I said it wrong.

BTW the book Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow has some good explanations of how our brain gets overloaded and how it creates automatic processes to do things.