This week saw the birth of #MandarinMonday on Twitter. There are no rules to #MandarinMonday as the idea behind it was to encourage people learning Chinese to use their Mandarin. Just turn up, tweet in Mandarin and use the #MandarinMonday hashtag.

I think it was a success, with 16 people using the #MandarinMonday hashtag. There is an obvious question though and that is to do with accuracy or grammatical correctness. With so many non-native speakers practising together, isn’t there a chance that we will learn bad habits, and not have our mistakes corrected? Undoubtedly this is a possibility but for me there is great benefit in just getting out there and trying to use Mandarin, practice reading and typing Hanzi and just generally having a go. Mistakes can be corrected later.

That said, I must offer a big thankyou to @yanghuawawa (a.k.a @pinyin) for helping us out, correcting our mistakes and offering genuine encouragement.

So, if you are learning Mandarin, jump on Twitter and join us for the next #MandarinMonday. No matter what level you are, you are more than welcome to chime in with the odd 你好 or 谢谢. I for one am looking forward to it.

A big thank you to all those who took part:
@yanghuawawa, @haiyo, @8a22a, @puerhan, @mynameistan, @pinyin, @Joerup, @chopapi, @RavinDave, @hippoman, @excuter, @cdrum, @inzania, @mad_alchemist, @MissXu, and @pdenlinger

Follow the event on Twitter: #MandarinMonday