Interview with Olle Linge, Hacking Chinese’s founder

After almost a year we come back with our interviews to the superstars of Mandarin language, that this those people that not only are studying Mandarin but, through the internet, contribute to the always growing community of Chinese learners with their own wisdom.

Today we’ll talk with Olle Linge, a 30 years old Swedish guy that spent the last seven years learning Chinese (and how to teach it). Olle is the founder & soul of Hacking Chinese, one of my favorite website that focus on Chinese learning. But, as usual, we aren’t going to talk about how to learn Chinese…

Introducing Hacking Chinese

Olle, Hacking Chinese isn’t a simple blog. Sure, the foundation of the website are your articles. However what impresses me the most is the community of people you built: the ones that comment on your articles, the ones that discuss or ask you for advice on Twitter or, why not, the ones that participate to the challenges you propose. When did you start Hacking Chinese and why? What was your initial goal?

Hacking Chinese was officially launched in the summer of 2010 and the goal was to create a place where I could share my thoughts on Chinese language education. I had already written quite a bit about this on my personal website earlier, but it took up more and more of my time and rather than cluttering my own site, I thought I’d create a new site which only dedicated to Chinese!

Is the goal still the same?

That was four years ago and a lot have happened since then. Back then, Chinese was still just something I did for fun. I still write/learn/teach mostly for fun, but I regard this more and more as my job rather than a side project. This is something I hope to be able to emphasise much more in the near future!

I know that building a fairly popular website without spending any money on ads or other promotions is difficult. What were your main challenges on making Hacking Chinese one of the most popular website about Chinese learning?

I think my main problem has been to overcome anxiety over that what I write isn’t good enough. I still have this problem when it comes to completely new areas, such as new services or products. It’s easy for me to do more of the same, but I’m much slower when it comes to moving in entirely new direction. My resource sharing section is an excellent exception where I have actually produced something entirely new that I hope will be genuinely useful for fellow students and teachers.

You just opened this new section of your website, called “Hacking Chinese Resources“. What is it, how it works and how people can participate?

I want Hacking Chinese Resources to be the first place students and teachers go when they want to find useful resources for learning Chinese suitable to their needs. As opposed to most other sites that also share links of different kinds, this service is built to last and uses a solid tag structure that allows students and teachers to find suitable material.
Source: http://www.saporedicina.com/english/interview-with-olle-linge-hacking-chinese-founder/