The author, Benny Lewis, writes, "I speak 11 languages - including Mandarin Chinese. You may have seen me speaking at TEDx or featured in the National Geographic magazine.

"Mandarin was the 18th new language I learned to speak. As such, I had a lot of previous experience learning languages. Even so, when I went to live in China, I knew learning Chinese would be a challenge.

"What happened?

"Learning Chinese was a challenge. But I didn’t find it to be impossible in any way. There are many parts of learning Chinese that are more work than in European languages. On the flip side, there are many parts of Chinese that are genuinely easy in comparison.

"By plunging in at the deep-end and using the full immersion approach, I forced myself to make thousands of mistakes as I learned Chinese.

"From every mistake I learned something. Over time, I developed effective techniques for learning Chinese. These techniques are my language hacks for becoming a Mandarin speaker.

"The hacks I discovered eventually made Chinese an easy language for me to learn. And now, I’ve decided to share them. You can use these hacks without discovering them the hard way (through the school of hard knocks) as I did."