Check in with Alex

Do you realise how big or small your sample size is?

I’m sure we are all guilty of this at one point: have you ever had a particularly good or bad experience and then rushed to judgment assuming that this one experience represented a massive group of people? Let’s see how we can avoid making this mistake.

5 lessons I have learnt about podcasting

In a slightly different podcast today I share with you five lessons I have learnt since I have started my podcasting journey. If you have any other good points that would help make me a better podcast please let me know, thank you.

Mother tongue, first language or native speaker?

Today you get another post about languages, this has always been a topic that has frustrated me so much because I speak English as a first language yet many people will not consider me a native speaker because of the colour of my skin.
I also talk about my mother tongue and my heritage language, which I am not fluent in. Yet many people will not even question me if I claimed to be a native speaker of that language. There’s something incredibly wrong with the way most people classify native speakers.

Should we still bother learning foreign languages?

In the age of Google translate and most young people learning English as a global lingua franca, is there any point in struggling to learn a foreign language anymore in 2025? Well yes, of course and let me tell you why.

Why ”where are you from?” is a taboo question.

Hello again, I have just returned from a skiing trip in France and I met an old French man in a small village who thought he had the right to interrogate me and find out what kind of Asian I was. It turned quite nasty because I felt it was extremely offensive to be interrogated like that when I was simply minding my own business. Let me explain how I would’ve engaged someone. I have only just met.

Why I don’t celebrate Christmas or New Year

This is a weird podcast that was inspired by the fact that most people have spent the last few days celebrating Christmas and they are looking forward to celebrating New Year. In sharp contrast, I have stopped celebrating things like Christmas, New Year, birthdays or anything like that because I believe that such celebrations are meaningless unless you have actually earned the right to celebrate by achieving something amazing. Bah humbug!

Mind the gap: being working class, autistic and Chinese

In today’s podcast , I explore the impacts of growing up in a very working class, autistic and Chinese family. And I must warn you that there is a lot of swearing and a lot of anger because I feel like I have the right to talk honestly about this issue whilst many people would simply sweep it under the carpet out of shame. Not me, I’m shameless and I’m happy to share my story.

Incentives, money and the working class mentality

Today I am going to tackle a far more controversial topic relating to my very working class upbringing: this is about how working class people are often not incentivised to try harder and how this is not actually their fault but a problem that is inherently part of the system.

How people irk me in French and Mandarin

In today’s post, I reflect upon how things have changed in France because when I used to live in France back in the 1990s, nobody would speak to me in English at all. However, today, these young French people can’t wait to show off to me just how fluent they are in English. And then there are these Chinese people from China who assume that I can’t speak Mandarin and they want to struggle on with me in English. Look if I do speak your language, then why wouldn’t you speak to me in your language?

How many languages do I speak?

This is a question I often get asked and I suppose it would depend on where you draw the line and I am going to embarrass myself by struggling in some of the languages that I am not fluent in.