In Mandarin, if you walk into a restaurant and say, "wǒ yào shuì jiào," you're saying "I want to sleep," but you probably meant "wǒ yào shuǐ jiǎo," "I want dumplings."

You'll also commonly hear the capital of China pronounce BeiZHing with a ZH sound instead of with a J sound that is both written in English and pronounced in Mandarin.

or you're learning how to speak Mandarin.

-[ Speaking Mandarin ]

Ooh, can you explain how to pronounce the Mandarin one?

[voice of male speaking Mandarin] "Yāzi"

On a mandarin Chuck it in a river

and some of their staff speak Mandarin

You've heard Cantonese speakers call them "lai see" and Mandarin speakers call them "hong bao".

And I can vouch for that because I have started from scratch in languages like Mandarin, in Japanese, in Arabic, in Persian, those were languages that were quite different from languages that I already knew and therefore I was totally starting from scratch.

Now, in terms of specifics of learning strategy, so learning Mandarin, for example, the first three months we used Romanized text, we listened to Mandarin, spoken at what I thought was a very fast speed, which subsequently I discovered wasn't all that fast.

In Mandarin, it's Song Sua Bing.

I don't know answer in Mandarin back,

That's why I got straight C's last year, and that's why my mom had to bribe me with a new snowboard to come to Taiwan and learn Mandarin, even though my Mandarin sucks ass.