Frustrated that her teenage son completed high school without being offered a Mandarin course, Shining Rainbow from Wombarra on the South Coast decided to teach herself.
“I thought, what can I do about it? I will try and learn Mandarin,” she said.
A relative, who speaks Mandarin, recommended Ms Rainbow start with Duolingo, an American language-learning website and mobile app.
Ms Rainbow once attempted to learn Spanish, but she says learning Mandarin is much easier.
“I have found that Mandarin — to my understanding as a complete amateur — the grammar seems simple and sentences are arranged differently, but it is consistently different,” she said.
“You only have to learn it once.