Meet the Team Behind Your Favorite Mandarin Chinese Graded Readers

Our Team

Yang Song 宋暘

Founder, Writer & Editor

Coming from a distinguished lineage of educators, Song is an award-winning certified Chinese teacher. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages and a Master's degree in TESOL. His passion for language teaching and acquisition has led to the creation of award-winning curriculum, which he has presented at national conferences in the United States and which has been adopted by numerous schools in Arizona. Outside of his professional life, he enjoys practicing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, staring at his fish tank, and playing video games. His Instagram feed is filled with videos of cute animals and martial arts fights.

Founder, Editor & Content Planner

Jazmine Song 宋茉莉

Jazmine began self-learning Chinese when she was a teenager. After high school, she attended Arizona State University to study Business and Chinese. During her undergraduate studies, she won 2nd place in the Chinese Bridge competition for the southwest region of the United States. This achievement earned her a trip to China, where she connected with hundreds of other Chinese learners from around the world. Soon after, she also studied abroad for a summer at Tsinghua University in Beijing. After graduating with a B.A. in Business (Chinese), she pursued a Master's degree in Secondary Education.

  • What started as a pandemic passion project in our tiny Arizona studio has blossomed into our lifetime mission. Back then, we were both teaching high school math, spending our free time dreaming up ways to make Mandarin learning more engaging.

    Eventually, we packed up our lives and relocated to Taiwan. After moving, we decided to take a year off to take care of our son. That beautiful, busy year gave us the time and space to finally map out all of our ideas and bring MandoLearn to life.

    We poured our heart and soul into writing engaging books and creating a seamless, stress-free user experience.

  • We designed our graded readers based on the exact frustrations Jazmine faced as a student, combined with Song’s professional teaching background:

    • Real, Localized Mandarin: Most traditional resources use a Northern-style Mandarin that doesn't match everyday life here in Taiwan. Plus, many simplified books rely on dry, outdated language. We focus entirely on the natural vocabulary you actually hear on the streets.

    • No More "Dictionary Diving": We hated ebooks that kick you to the very back of the book for a footnote. Our digital readers feature instant, clickable popup definitions right on the word. For our paperbacks, handy footnotes sit right at the bottom of the page.

    • Clean, Distraction-Free Pages: Plastering pinyin all over the place is incredibly distracting and stops you from actually memorizing characters. We keep our layouts clean, crisp, and beautifully formatted so your eyes can focus.

    • Relatable, Modern Stories: We were so tired of dry, overly historical tales that feel totally disconnected from modern life. Our books feature exciting, engaging stories written for serious learners building real-world fluency.

  • We take huge pride in our craft. Every single story we offer is written, edited, translated, narrated, and illustrated by real people. While we occasionally use AI as a helpful assistant to catch typos during editing, our content is entirely human-made. When you open a MandoLearn book, you are engaging with a true labor of love.

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