14 ms·

12 Months of Mandarin

502 points by misiti3780 2y ago

_lvbh 2y ago
This is really impressive. Its not an easy language > 1 hour of Chinese content before sleep, e.g. anime dubs or books There are also anime (donghua) originating entirely in China. I think those might be more helpful than Anime dubs since the content fits better with the language. Swallowed Star, 斗罗大陆, and 一人之下 are pretty fun.
- kainduhh 2y ago
  [flagged]
- kulahan 2y ago
  I've come across so many donghua that seem really cool, but the English translations are just so bad. Could be a cool way to get a little further into their culture.
  - _lvbh 2y ago
    I think immerison is a pretty good way of learning a language. When consuming content without crutches like subtitles, you take in a lot more. I basically learnt Hokkien over the past few years by just listening to people speak it a ton and trying to match the context.
vunderba 2y ago
I commend the author's discipline - this is a pretty standard approach. TLDR - Move as many things as possible in regular life to the target language (software, tv shows, reading, etc) to maintain the language - There is no substitute for full immersion if you have the opportunity. I learned traditional Chinese in Taiwan while I was an ESL teacher. - The power of SRS (spaced repetition system) cannot be overstated I will add my own bit to it. If you like mnemonic systems, Heisig wrote a very good book called "Remembering Traditional Hanzi" where the idea is to use the radicals in the character to construct a visual image to aid in recall. I highly recommend it. https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/remembering-traditional-hanzi-1-how-not-to-forget-the-meaning-and-writing-of-chinese-characters https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/remembering-traditional-han...
- wccrawford 2y ago
  Do you mean "cannot be overstated"? "Cannot be understated" means you can't talk badly enough about it. "Cannot be overstated" would mean it's impossible to talk too highly of it.
  - vunderba 2y ago
    Updated! Guess I traded a bit of my fluency in English for Chinese. :p
- alexawarrior4 2y ago
  "The power of SRS (spaced repetition system) cannot be overstated" For an alternative take, there is at least some evidence that SRS is entirely unnecessary and can even hinder language learning. I know it at least is not required by first language speakers, and have also seen many examples of fluent second and third language speakers who never use SRS, or any other kind of "practiced" language acquisition such as learning vocabulary, grammar, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis For instance here's a PhD thesis of someone who learned French to fluency with only watching TV and (later) reading books: https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:9b49365 https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:9b49365
  - vunderba 2y ago
    One of the points in Input Hypothesis is something I'm sure everybody would agree with: This states that learners progress in their knowledge of the language when they comprehend language input that is slightly more advanced than their current level. Krashen called this level of input "i+1", where "i" is the learner's interlanguage and "+1" is the next stage of language acquisition. Informally I've always called it "walking the knife's edge" - you have to be always on the slight edge of feeling uncomfortable to realize meaningful gains. I mean it makes logical sense. The brain is ALWAYS trying to optimize away through chunking/patterns/etc. so you have to be constantly challenging it. It's the reason why there's a huge skill difference between a driver at one month vs 1 year, but a far less difference between a driver at one year vs ten years.
bluechair 2y ago
It might be helpful to someone, so I’m suggesting something similar for Spanish: * https://www.dreamingspanish.com https://www.dreamingspanish.com
- kklisura 2y ago
  Anything similar for Japanese?
  - kentosi-dw 2y ago
    Yes if you type "japanese conversation" in youtube you'll get lots of people mirroring this format. (Sorry at work and youtube is locked for me).
  - willmorrison 2y ago
    Take a look at https://refold.link/Japanese_resources https://refold.link/Japanese_resources
    - joshdavham 2y ago
      I can vouch. I followed the Refold method to learn French and am also following it for Japanese.
  - joshdavham 2y ago
    Yes! You should checkout https://cijapanese.com/ https://cijapanese.com/ It's an awesome site with just under 1,000 videos. There are also transcripts and a time tracker to help track your progress. Note I'm not affiliated, but am just a happy user. (Also my friend is the site developer)
  - famouswaffles 2y ago
    https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page#Japanese https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page#Japanese
edent 2y ago
While I haven't the same proficiency, I had the same "local celebrity" experience when visiting Beijing. While it is fun at first seeing people double take and then ask to take a photo with you - it gets old fast! Mind you, I'll never tire of (partially) understanding what people say about me when they think I don't understand. One thing not mentioned is that it is often a good idea to have some formal testing. Friends and tutors may overlook your mistakes. A dispassionate exam board likely won't.
- iforgotpassword 2y ago
  Are you not white or otherwise have unusual features? I'm a random white dude and I've been to Beijing and Shanghai many times over the past 15 years, and while I was asked for a photo a few times at parks or touristy places, it was far from feeling like a celeb or anything. And it has gotten less and less over the past years, but maybe that's because I'm getting older and more boring. :)
  - hangonhn 2y ago
    You need to leave Beijing and especially Shanghai and head farther inland to regain your celebrity status! I (ethnic Chinese) went to China with two friends from Texas in the early 2010s. One of them has long blonde hair. She was never stopped in Shanghai, a couple of times in Beijing, but in Chengdu, they were just so amazed by her and her husband (but mostly her and her long blonde hair). People wanted to take pictures with my friends. Maybe things have changed a lot since then but worth a try! Chengdu is definitely worth visiting and I'm sure there are many very interesting more inland cities in China to visit (and maybe be a celebrity for a moment).
    - iforgotpassword 2y ago
      Yes, going to smaller cities has always been on my list but never worked out. I did Tianjin and Qingdao last and this year, but they are still too big it seems. Stayed three days both times and there was nothing more than a few stares.
    - 2y ago
stuxfian 2y ago
Nice
kentosi-dw 2y ago
The importance of an SRS system like Anki cannot be overstated. However I can see how this might be a burden to some when it comes to entering in your own sentences. For this, I highly recommend making use of your OS's dictation (speech to text) feature. You get to practice speaking _and_ enter sentences much quicker.
- Trufa 2y ago
  I'm learning Indonesian the right way after having learned German in the wrongest possible way and ANKI is just amazing for language learning, 4 months in and I'm having basic conversations.
  - alanwreath 2y ago
    Sorry maybe this is the wrong question. But with regard to ANKI (all caps) are referring to some app?
    - keiferski 2y ago
      https://apps.ankiweb.net https://apps.ankiweb.net
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- thatsnotmepls 2y ago
  I have ChatGPT create 20 sentences for a new word I want to learn, works super well with Anki. Front -> Word. Click button, shows random sentence out of 20. Back -> Word and sentence translation.
  - cblum 2y ago
    The trouble with ChatGPT is that it can produce wonky sentences sometimes, and as a learner it can be hard to validate that. Most of the time it’s great though, just need to be cautious and ideally find a way to validate the content it generates (in my case I can run it by my wife). I use ChatGPT to check my answers to the exercises in my textbooks :)
cyberlimerence 2y ago
I don't know Mandarin, but I found this browser extension [1] very useful for quickly translating some words. It doesn't translate sentences unfortunately, but I guess you can use machine translation for that. I'm curious if/how anyone here has integrated LLMs for their language learning process. Also after you learn a certain amount of basic words in any language, I recommend trying to learn that language from inside out. Basically instead of translating new words to your primary language, look for a dictionary which will explain those words with basic ones you already know. [1] https://github.com/cschiller/zhongwen https://github.com/cschiller/zhongwen
- jimmywetnips 2y ago
  GPT has been a godsend. For basically being a very competent super knowledgeable tutor of every single language. So if I have some weird question about some language mechanism I can ask it in the domain that I know which is English or a romance language and it will do some compare and contrast. I can ask it about the etymology of the word and the development of certain verbs which helps me to really remember things. The way that it knows what you mean because it has such a vast knowledge base but also the fact that it is an expert in both source and target languages, and how nowadays with voice chat it speaks it with a correct accent means there's really nothing else like it to be honest Like, is there potentially a human being who can surpass the abilities of GPT in this domain? Absolutely but that particular professor or tutor needs to not only be native proficient in both languages, speak both without accidents, but also be patient and understand what you're trying to ask without any judgment. And now try to do that for one to N language pairs and basically the talent pool shrinks to zero. Oh and you want it on demand to scratch a curious itch while driving down the road. No human can offer this service.
- mncharity 2y ago
  > integrated LLMs for their language learning process Fwiw, TFA's methods page[1] has a GPT section. [1] https://isaak.net/mandarinmethods/#use-gpt https://isaak.net/mandarinmethods/#use-gpt
- mncharity 2y ago
  > browser extension I've pondered doing a browser extension which invasively replaces bits of english web text with some other language(s). Mousing to get english (which also signals I haven't learned that bit yet), and spoken, and discussion. Bit selection probabilistic on commonness (in both the language and the web page), and on learning. Plus an "I want to learn this bit" list. A replacement aggressiveness slider for "not now please". Basically making all web pages into code-switching polyglots, and shifting general web surfing into an "always learning something" zone.
alberth 2y ago
Different language, but I’d highly recommend Tokyo Vice as a tv show. The main actor, Ansel Elgort, learned Japanese in 1-month time. https://malaysia.news.yahoo.com/ansel-elgort-learned-japanese-four-043943978.html https://malaysia.news.yahoo.com/ansel-elgort-learned-japanes... Granted he probably was learning more pronunciation to say his lines. But Japanese actors on set have commented at how surprised they were in his mastery of the language off camera in such a short amount of time.
- joshdavham 2y ago
  I'm not familiar with the show, but, you can't learn any language in one month. That is a myth. The reason for this is actually mathematical. To understand a language you need to know at least a couple thousand words and you can't realistically learn thousands of words in a month. That takes time.
  - pastage 2y ago
    The state department says 88 weeks for Japanese[1]. A month is a long time with full immersion, getting the basics right will get you far enough that people will help you with the rest. I could communicate relatively well with two weeks of immersion but I did not finnish learning it in 100 weeks. [1] https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/ https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/
    - FranzFerdiNaN 2y ago
      Yeah I highly doubt you could “communicate fairly well” in Japanese after two weeks. You might have memorized some standard phrases, sure. But two weeks would not even be enough when going from Dutch to German or English to French.
      - joshdavham 2y ago
        It's unfortunate, but I think these "I learned x language in y weeks/months" memes are probably here to stay. After spending the last year becoming technical (data science -> software eng) and seeing all those "I learned to program in 3 months and got a job at Google" videos, I'm convinced that this is just the dunning kruger effect of not knowing enough about the subject to understand how long it takes to become competent. Furthermore the "I learned x in y time" meme is almost always perpetuated by false beginners. I remember seeing an "I learned Italian in one week" video where the guy actually knew some Italian beforehand. He also had previously learned fluent French and Spanish beforehand, so to say he learned Italian from scratch is a huge stretch.
CollinEMac 2y ago
I'm always surprised when people mention watching shows in their target language as a study method. For me, I don't understand much and my mind starts to wander pretty quickly.
- alexawarrior4 2y ago
  I had the same problem, the solution is to start with extremely easy content, either from a language learning site/channel or content targeted at toddlers. Even 2 year olds already have quite advanced language skills! Peppa Pig is a perennial favorite. You build up from there with childrens' shows, cartoons, and at some point later on introduce graded readers. Watching full-speed native TV shows is like the final exam after 1500+ hours of study, and even then may have a lot not understood if you aren't familiar with the slang/dialect. This is especially true for heavily dialectical languages such as Chinese where it's common to always watch with subtitles on.
  - bigstrat2003 2y ago
    Besides watching things aimed at young children, another tactic I have found effective is to watch something you already know very well in English (or whatever your native language). For me, this has been South Park. I'll watch episodes that I practically know by heart already, so that even if I don't understand all the Spanish words I can pick up things from knowing what is happening.
    - hyperG 2y ago
      Thanks. That is a really great idea.
- joshdavham 2y ago
  There are five tricks I'd recommend to stay focused. 1. Try watching something that is actually interesting. Often this could be something you'd like to rewatch that you've seen before, but now dubbed in your target language. 2. Try watching something that you understand. Search "[target language] comprehensible input". This content has been simplified for people like you. 3. Focus on what you DO understand, not what you don't understand. Not only does this not weigh you down, it also give you something to focus on. 4. Pop bubble wrap (or something). Watching a TV show is effectively "doing nothing" and this makes some people uncomfortable (sorta like struggling to meditate). If you can find something to do while you're "doing nothing", this can help a lot!
wwarner 2y ago
Best anki testimonial that I've read.
cynicalpeace 2y ago
I hitchhiked China for 3 months in 2018 after studying Chinese for 2 semesters of college beforehand. Hitchhiking is by far one of the best ways to learn a new language. Long hours with a wide variety of individuals, mostly one-on-one. If you're young, and you're reading this, go hitchhike. It's not as safe as staying home with mom, but it's not as dangerous as people who have never done it say it is. I "achieved intermediate fluency" during that time. But it's gone now. If you don't use it, you lose it.
- vunderba 2y ago
  Or go teach. Barrier to entry to becoming an ESL teacher particularly in southeast Asia is relatively low, and its the best way to integrate into the culture.
  - cynicalpeace 2y ago
    I don't have first hand experience with that, but it seems that might actually be a poor way to learn, because everyone will want to speak English to you. I've had to selfishly refuse to speak English to people many times.
    - vunderba 2y ago
      Everyone in your class of course, but its not like you're wearing a tag that say "English Teacher" when you're just walking around. I also bypassed this pretty easily, my extended family / name is Italian, so I would always respond back in Italian, and then we'd revert to Chinese pretty quickly because NOBODY speaks Italian over there. Further since you're there on a work visa, you can eventually transition into translation work / etc. to really refine your language mastery. 3 months isn't bad, but I'd recommend a solid year. Following my time in Asia, I lived in Russia where I basically didn't use my Chinese for a couple years, but on a quick business trip to Taipei my fluency was there when I needed it.
      - cynicalpeace 2y ago
        lol nice trick with the Italian. I'd say to master any language there is no period of time that is sufficient. I've even gotten worse at speaking my native language since I speak Spanish all day. Like with exercise, or brushing your teeth, once you stop doing it, it will get worse and you will lose "it".
refactor_master 2y ago
Plug for this tool I’ve been using for SRS: https://hanzihero.com/ https://hanzihero.com/ Yes, it costs a bit of money every month, but it’s incredibly polished and fun (well, for the first couple of thousands of characters) to use. For a language with so many speakers it’s quite evident that Mandarin lacks the cultural foothold that Japanese has gained in the West. Good resources and community aimed at non-natives trying to learn are really few and far in between.
- comboy 2y ago
  Do they have anything in common with Mandarin Blueprint? It seems to use very similar mnemonics. How far did the tool get you?
  - refactor_master 2y ago
    I haven’t used Mandarin Blueprint so I can’t say. I think the mnemonics of Hanzi Hero are a bit hit or miss. They’re sometimes overly detailed compared to Wanikani which I’ve also used (for Japanese), which makes them just as hard to remember as the characters themselves sometimes. Overall the SRS and the polish took me to about 1200 characters in 6 months.
lxe 2y ago
I don't think I can do SRS. My dopamine system is at a point where I can't do anything for a long time that isn't interesting, has immediate or intermediate rewards, or can capture attention for a long time. And on top of that, repeating that habit requires all these criteria. Examples: Scrolling on the phone?: Basically direct dopamine injected into my brain. Can do indefinitely. Not good. Programming? Sure I can put a few hours in, or even days if building quick prototypes where the payoff is imminent. Reading? Can go on indefinitely, depending on the book: it's just continual stream of interesting immersive stuff Exercise? Well that depends on the activity. Running indoors without any stimulation: absolutely cannot do. Cycling or running or walking outside with an audiobook, or music? Absolutely: constant stimulation plus endorphins. Learning Piano? Only if I can bang out a few good tunes immediately in the session, then I can allow myself to struggle with the difficult stuff in between. Absolutely cannot and won't do rote deliberate practice. This hinders my progress significantly, but at least I have fun. Learning a language? Well, unless I can get imminent rewards, or be continually interested and engaged, there's just no way I'll be able to do this. And I feel like rote, deliberate practice is just impossible for me to build a habit out of. One way I know for a fact that I can learn another language is through necessity to communicate with it. Let's say I'm thrown into an environment where the ONLY way I can get anything done is through having to communicate directly, without the aid of translators or tools. I think this is how babies learn.
- hintymad 2y ago
  > I don't think I can do SRS No need. :-) Comprehensible Input and immersive language usage can be your superpower.
  - pessimizer 2y ago
    With old-school graded readers. Turns out that the people in past centuries who we ridiculed for their antiquated approaches for learning languages all spoke multiple languages. They didn't have comic books, though, which are another good source of interesting reading material that also comes with elaborate visual hints to what is being said. If I were trying to learn Mandarin, I'd scour the internet for bootleg scans of Jademan comics from the 80s.
cmuguythrow 2y ago
I’ve been learning Mandarin via Comprehensible Input (CI) for about 9 months and really admire OP’s dedication and consistency. In the first 4-5 months of being truly consistent with ~1hr a day of Anki and Peppa pig I got to around 2,000 words and was able to have a great experience when I traveled to Taiwan, so I can vouch for the core methodology in this post. It’s not “easy”, but it’s definitely the most effective way to learn a foreign language that I know of. The CI community has come a long way in the last ~5 or so years - the general consensus looks a lot like OP’s methods, which I would summarize as: 1. Brute force [premade Anki flashcard decks](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/810519009 https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/810519009) for the first ~1k most common words 2. Start watching comprehensible input as soon as you can, ideally for an hour a day or more 3. [Sentence mine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBcQJESGQvc)the https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBcQJESGQvc)the comprehensible input and add it to the daily SRS flashcard grind The best summary of these methods that I’ve found is https://refold.la/ https://refold.la/ Self plug: I’ve been working on a way to generate Mandarin audio comprehensible input using LLMs/TTS models. The idea is that there aren’t many great CI options between 500 words and ~3k-5k words - OP himself mentions that when he started watching Scissor Seven 刺客伍六七 he barely understood anything, which is pretty hard to “push through” without some hardcore willpower. My project https://plusonechinese.com https://plusonechinese.com makes Mandarin audio stories that are 85% comprehensible at any level from 400 words all the way to 8k or more words and then auto-imports the audio snippets into SRS flashcards, which makes a CI workflow like this a lot easier to engage with at a lower level and without advanced willpower. Still working on making the content _truly_ interesting, but would love some feedback!
- shubb 2y ago
  I was hoping to find something like your app. Haven't tried it yet but so excited!
- 15kingben 2y ago
  DuChinese is a great app for reading stories at beginner levels of vocabulary. It also supports tap-to-lookup and saving words to flashcards, but unfortunately they don't integrate with Anki, only their own app's system.
1stub 2y ago
Learning a language through input is incredibly effective and in my eyes much more enjoyable than the traditional classroom approach. For myself with Japanese it was after ~6 months of immersion and SRS that things really started to click and it became much more enjoyable.
hintymad 2y ago
A side topic, for those who have acquired Mandarin, do you think Chinese is a really easy-to-learn language in the long run? Yes, learning all the characters has a steep learning curve, but once one passes that stage, it's all about combination of the characters. That Chinese's grammar is heavily influenced by modern English also helped. I feel that the grammatical similarity between English and Chinese is closer than that between English and Spanish.
- subarctic 2y ago
  Is it similar to English? The one thing I remember is there's no tenses or gender.
  - hintymad 2y ago
    That's the simplified part. Otherwise, the basic structure of the two languages is subject + verb + object. A lot of semantics are constructed with the help of adverbs and particles without verb conjugations. For example, in English we say I have done that, and in Chinese we say 我做了(Or in Taiwan style，我有做了，which is even closer to English, though I'm not sure if that's from Japanese's やったことがありません). In contrast, in Spanish we'd say Lo he hecho - different sentence order, and tons of verb conjugation.
- indigo945 2y ago
  Yes, learning all the characters has a steep learning curve, but once one passes that stage, ... One never passes that stage, though? Even once you know the 6,000 characters that people often cite as being needed to read a novel, you'll still run into characters that you don't know (especially in proper names, but also in less common, especially literary or chengyu, vocabulary). I also disagree about the "grammatical similarity", but at the point of fluency we're talking about here (day-to-day fluency in idiomatic Chinese), that doesn't matter anyway, not even a bit.
  - g9yuayon 2y ago
    An elementary student in China probably won't learn more than 3000 characters, yet they can read advanced novels. I suspect the difference is that a native speaker feels more comfortable skipping or guess unknown words. I certainly felt more discomfort when encountering new words when reading even a popular fiction in English, while having no problem guessing the meaning of a new word in my native language.
gwintrob 2y ago
Love this :) Does anyone have similar experience learning Cantonese? I've been using Anki for a couple months now and it's great. ChatGPT and Claude have been a big help but they do sometimes get confused with Mandarin or go to a more "formal" Cantonese that sounds very traditional.
ilamont 2y ago
I really like the focus on watching or listening to source materials every day. This is where Duolingo fails, or at least how my SO uses it. It becomes a game for listening to snippets and remembering vocabulary, not actual comprehension of language spoken by native speakers. For anyone who is a student, I highly recommend the National Taiwan Normal University (師大) Mandarin Training Center summer sessions. The materials are developed and taught by well-trained teachers. It's completely immersive in the classroom, and it can be applied on the street every day you're there. They have programs for younger kids and middle school students (which my kids took some years back) as well as college and graduate students (http://www.mtc.ntnu.edu.tw/eng/course-seasonal.htm http://www.mtc.ntnu.edu.tw/eng/course-seasonal.htm).
- comboy 2y ago
  There are apps now that provide you with listening material improving your comprehension while also doing some SRS on it. Superchinese focuses on pronunciation a lot, Clozemaster on listening. HelloChinese and ChineseSkill are more duolingo-like but way better for Mandarin. And Untamed ("Leaving soon") is still on Netflix, it may seem cheesy but out of things I tried watching it has surprisingly clean, easy to understand language with lots of common phrases while also offering some interesting story.
triyambakam 2y ago
In case anyone reads this, soon or in the far off future... I really don't like Anki from a design perspective, but the technique behind it is great. I've really been enjoying Mochi [1] as an alternative. I am not affiliated, just an unpaid shill for a good app. [1] https://mochi.cards/ https://mochi.cards/
yorozu 2y ago
> I want to reach a level where the legendary Three-Body Problem will be comfortably readable. Good goal. I read the Three Body Problem in Chinese as a non-native speaker. It was challenging for me compared to other (non sci-fi) books due to the quantity and breadth of scientific jargon, but very enjoyable.
Balgair 2y ago
For those of you like me that had never heard of Bloom's 2 Sigma effect : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem "Bloom's 2 sigma problem refers to the educational phenomenon that the average student tutored one-to-one using mastery learning techniques performed two standard deviations better than students educated in a classroom environment." Um, what?! Why the hell am I not doing this for myself?
- aidenn0 2y ago
  Every single person I know who graduated college before 20 had a significant amount of their primary and/or secondary education somewhere along those lines. Sure, they were all also of above average intelligence, but most of them by not more than about 1 standard deviation. The schools around here are moving in a diametrically opposed direction to mastery learning by making sure every student is in the same class regardless of past performance (no honors classes, no remedial classes, no testing into advanced math &c.). The result was entirely predictable to pretty much everybody except the administrators who came up with this policy.
segmondy 2y ago
Dude is not your average human tho. Read their about page. In the recent past: I skipped out of high school in rural Austria to graduate early In a gap year, I spun up a $1M non-profit and ran the most viral tech conference of the year, featuring Sam Altman, Daniela Amodei, 3Blue1Brown, Veritasium and more. Worked through 4000 papers and self-taught roughly an undergrad's worth of biology in a year, then cold-emailed myself into Oxford to do neuroimmunology Self-taught Mandarin in a year to fluency Got interested in math and did a math undergrad at Berkeley in two years
rahimnathwani 2y ago
If you're doing all these things already, but want something for learning to write characters, Skritter is the best thing I know of. I used it many years ago (on a Windows PC using a Wacom tablet). Now my son is using the more modern iPad version. It uses spaced repetition, and you can ratchet up the difficulty as needed. In the default mode, for each stroke you make correctly, it will perfect its shape and position. This often results in an inadvertent hint. You can turn it off so it only ever shows the strokes exactly as you wrote them.
- ximeng 2y ago
  I’d second this. I learned to read and write Chinese through (around 2000 hours) of Skritter. It’s a lot easier to get conversational with a solid vocabulary too. And being able to efficiently study in any free time really helps.
daft_pink 2y ago
Thanks this is awesome. My wife is chinese and I’m going to try and copy some of your methods.
wantsanagent 2y ago
I don't care about learning Mandarin, I want to find out how this guy's motivation system works and then download it into my brain. Doing a PhD and learning Mandarin as a side project?! Doing hours of Anki practice and new note taking, some of it while running on a treadmill? There's just a crazy amount of drive (and what sounds like an epic memory) here. I don't think people consider base motivation enough when thinking about processes and this guy won some kind of biological and/or upbringing lottery.
- musicale 2y ago
  https://structuredprocrastination.com https://structuredprocrastination.com See also "The Art of Procrastination" (2012).
  - spongebobism 2y ago
    Thanks, that was a great read and resonates a lot with me. Looking back, most of my learning new languages, getting in shape, playing the guitar, and making new friends was structured procrastination.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- layman51 2y ago
  It’s interesting that you mention motivation/drive on a post like this. I have similar thoughts whenever there are posts about personalized learning technology or improving public education.
- trhway 2y ago
  >download it into my brain "it" is the youth. The guy looks to be mid-20ies. Back then in those years i could go for 3 days without sleep while working, studying, drinking, etc. and many of my friends and classmates at the University were similar.
  - seper8 2y ago
modeless 2y ago
I started a spaced repetition program for Mandarin, and I can see that it works well. Even though it's the fastest way, it still takes a discouraging amount of time and it is no fun at all. I don't know if the process can ever be made any faster, but I am hopeful that AI agents will soon be able to at least make it a lot more enjoyable.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 2y ago
  I learned French from 2021-2023 by taking weekly lessons. Before then I'd dabbled in all kinds of methods like Anki and tapes. Nothing works like having private or small class lessons with a teacher who can immediately correct you. Nothing. I went from barely able to speak or conjugate, to having conversations with my french colleagues, telling jokes, and reading novels, in French. If you have the means, taking lessons is, at least for me, wildly more entertaining, fulfilling, and better than trying to go alone. I'm not affiliated at all, but using iTalki can really be a game-changer if you're trying to get conversational. A language is used and using the language over and over in conversations is the best method for learning and getting better at one.
kjellsbells 2y ago
This is impressive and inspiring. Not to detract at all from his dedication, but it really helps that there are so many content/resources in the target language: news, kids shows, anime, tutors, emigrant diaspora. As a side quest, look at another reputedly-hard language like Vietnamese, where there is not nearly so much. As an example, Google and Microsoft Translator apps speak different variants of Vietnamese (Northern and Southern respectively), and (because they are trained statistically on whatever limited corpuses are available) they seem strangely limited in what they can do/how accurate they are.
- famouswaffles 2y ago
  You should try any of the SOTA LLMs (4o, Claude, Gemini) for translation rather than Google/Microsoft Translate. They are much better.
  - blakedzc 2y ago
    In my experience, if you ask 4o or Claude for the definition of a word, they can fumble the tone and get meanings of toneless words mixed up. For instance, when prompted for the meaning of "da", it correctly provides skin, but also provides "already", which is a confusion with "đã". I don't believe I had any notable difference in error rate between Claude and 4o, and it's looking like I will create a system to have someone manually review what is generated. My main motivation for working on this is that there is such a drought of materials. SOTA LLMs are certainly great and have a pretty good effectiveness, but I wouldn't say they make great teachers of more obscure languages yet. I recall the Llama models explicitly state what languages the model is proficient in.
- spongebobism 2y ago
  And Vietnamese is still one of the luckier languages out there, having a nation state behind it with all the media that comes along with it. A large majority of the world's languages don't even have that.
blisterpeanuts 2y ago
Very fun blog to read, especially since I've been through a somewhat related though far less rigorous experience; a China major, spent 2 years in Taiwan while undergrad, then 2 years grad school, 7 years total studying modern Mandarin, classical Chinese, and some dialects (mostly Taiwanese i.e. Minnan dialect, and some Cantonese). The key, in my experience, is having a young brain. Chinese is different from a Western phonetic language and I believe the characters are stored in a different part of the brain than are, for example, English words. Perhaps in an image processing center. Others smarter than I could probably correct & expand on this. When I was 20, I could learn dozens or hundreds of characters a week. Decades later, that ability has faded. I've never had a very good memory, though, so maybe others are still able to absorb and retain the characters (and character combinations) at an older age. Isaak seems exceptionally bright, to judge by his "About" page which is kind of amazing. But possibly his best tactic has been to immerse himself maximally, force himself to watch Chinese-dubbed anime, get his teacher to teach in Mandarin, and go to the country itself and spend all day speaking to people which in the long run is the way to really get the spoken language down, complementing all those characters you're stuffing into your head.
- freemany 2y ago
  thank you for the kind words!
Always42 2y ago
Any equivalent resources for spanish?
msvan 2y ago
I kind of see myself from ten years ago in this blog post! I also obsessively studied Mandarin Chinese in my late teens for the sheer fun of it, before doing a math undergrad. I even wrote comments on Hacker News about it a decade ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7622940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7622940. At the time I had seemingly limitless motivation for grinding away on flashcards and other learning materials. My progress was strong and I passed the HSK6 after a year and a half or so of studying, which at the time was the highest level of certification offered. I think they changed the system since and added more levels beyond 6. You can do amazing things if you're dedicated! Today my Chinese is absolutely unusable, and my views on China have soured to the extent that I don't really want to revive my old skills. My takeaway is that learning one of these languages, the CJK languages, Arabic, or similarly weird languages, is just too much effort and I don't think it's worth it. I clearly had a lot of excess energy at the time that I could've directed towards something better. Knowing Chinese is about as useful as juggling and you might as well get really good at juggling if you're bored. It'll save you a few thousand hours.
- crazygringo 2y ago
  > Today my Chinese is absolutely unusable Something similar happened to me -- did intensive Mandarin study in college followed by a summer in Beijing being totally immersed. Was incredible. Then continued with a language course back home, and watched as my vocabulary shrank -- something like 4 hrs/wk. of class (with homework on top) couldn't even maintain my Mandarin, much less improve it. Today I can't understand a thing -- I've literally forgotten it all except for counting to ten and some basic phrases. In hindsight, it was utterly wasted effort, except for the cultural benefits of the summer abroad. In contrast, I can understand and get by in French and Spanish and Italian just fine, despite having studied those far less. If I'm traveling somewhere I just do a quick review of verb conjugations beforehand. But they just share so many cognates with English. When television is télévision or televisión or televisione it's just not that hard. But when television is diànshì, and virtually every word is brand-new like that... it's just not worth it. (And even when you learn a new word in e.g. Spanish that's totally different from English, you'll often get it "for free" in another one -- e.g. "pretend" is fingir in Spanish, and fingere in Italian.)
nojs 2y ago
This is an impressive achievement. > Frequency-based learning. Comprehensible input. Reading lots as soon as I could, especially graded readers. Reading content that personally interests you is very important and often underrated. The "emotional connection" to what you're reading helps learning a lot. There’s a lot of potential to improve the reading experience for Chinese. I recently built a syntax-highlighting tool [1] that helps you understand arbitrary text, which I have found quite helpful. If you are based in Taiwan and interested in working in this space, hit me up! My email is in my profile. 1. https://dragonmandarin.com/reader https://dragonmandarin.com/reader
dluan 2y ago
I've been studying again for the past 6 months after going probably 10 years without putting in any effort. I quickly picked it back up, breezing through HSK 2 and 3, and now just about to be at HSK 5 soon. At times it feels daunting just going off the recommended number of hours needed to get to HSK 6 (5,760 hours), but it's actually been flying way faster than I expected. It's actually pretty great language for self-study once you get to a good enough foundation. It's really endless and there's so many rabbit holes to get stuck in - ancient literary language especially. I'm excited to try and get deeper in to that. My ultimate goal is to be able to read the Big 4 novels confidently. It's also one of the weird things where motivation has a real snowball effect. The more you know, the more it feels like you can do, the more doors it opens for exploring entirely new areas. It helps that with Chinese there's so much that feels locked up or hidden from normal western view. Want to learn about tea production, culture, and history? Need to learn Chinese. Want to better understand Japanese kanji and history? Need to learn Chinese. Trying to grasp all the distinct geographic dialects and idiosyncrasies is tricky. Also the fact that a quarter of the planet kind of lives and operates on a separate internet, and the FOMO I felt by not being able to understand that. Anyways, 10/10 definitely recommend. My plan is to keep chugging through and get to HSK 6 studying after my newborn infant arrives in 2 months, though I don't know if I can keep up the 10 hours a week I'm currently managing. I'm also doing elementary Japanese at a way more casual pace with local classes, and my Spanish has disintegrated to barely being usable. There are so many more helpful tools and communities that exist now than 10-20 years ago, like chrome extensions and better repetition tools, though I still enjoy just handwriting in a notebook a bunch.
- cblum 2y ago
  > My plan is to keep chugging through and get to HSK 6 studying after my newborn infant arrives in 2 months, though I don't know if I can keep up the 10 hours a week I'm currently managing. I have a 5-month old baby and I can tell you it’s possible to keep your language learning going, but you’ll have to be more intentional or even forceful about it. Before my son was born I studied/immersed almost all day except when I was working or hanging out with my wife (and often the latter still counted as immersion since she’s Chinese :) and we’d watch Chinese TV shows together). After he was born time became si significantly more limited, but I was (am) determined to keep learning the language. Here’s some of what I do: - I could drive 15 minutes to work, but instead I take public transit. That helps me accomplish two things: daily exercise walking to and from the station, and time to listen to podcasts or audiobooks (in Chinese, of course). Once I’m on the bus/train, I’ll either do Anki or a Hello Chinese lesson. - I try to go to the office as early as possible on any given day, and use the extra time before work to study. I could do this at home, but it’s quieter in the office. - Most days I’ll spend my whole lunch break on language learning. - I stick to all of this even on days when the baby kept us up all night long. Some important things to bring up: - This all comes at the expense of not having time for any other interests. I have a whole backlog of sci-fi books and other material I’d love to read, but I choose to prioritize learning Mandarin. - I’m paying a price when it comes to making connections at work. Spending my whole lunch hour on learning means I stopped joining coworkers for lunch. Although right now I also don’t join them to minimize potential exposure to sickness that I could bring home and pass to the baby. - This can also be detrimental to job performance. I could be putting in more time on learning job-related stuff or simply getting more done, but again, I consider learning Mandarin a priority. - Other than Anki, I don’t do any learning on weekends. There’s just no time or opportunity to do so. Not sure if any of this will apply or be doable to you. A lot of it will also come down to your family situation and your relationship with your partner. In my case, I’m lucky that she’s very supportive of my interest in her language. Good luck! The baby will be a ton of work but also a ton of fun and love :D
hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
Xiomanyc enters the chat.
105424 2y ago
I would be very interested in the ANKI megadeck. I have spend quite some time cleaning up and testing out different ANKI decks in Chinese and i need quite a motivated day to extend or create new ones. I had a similar "local celebrity" experience while traveling with another dutch person around Hubei, people would ask us for pictures at stores because we where the first foreigner to ever be there. Interestingly i thought it was quite positive as i felt the interest of people was a mix between curiosity and excitement to show of their culture while my friends experience was quite negative as he thought the interest was coming from prejudice or negativity. Great example of how 2 people experiencing the same thing can have very different take always and how what you bring to a place is usually what you get back from it.
- freemany 2y ago
  isaak.net/mandarinmethods
AlchemistCamp 2y ago
The stated goal of comfortably reading 三體 (3 body problem) is a tough one. The first chapter is full of Cultural Revolution era vocabulary and later parts of the book contain a lot of science / philosophy jargon. If he can read that book comfortably, without researching and speed-running its exact vocabulary, then I'd say he's definitely an advanced learner.
- baby 2y ago
  I gave up in the first paragraph
est 2y ago
offtopic, I really hope Duolingo adopt some aspect of Anki.
closetkantian 2y ago
I agree with a lot of the author's recommendations. Here are my 7 tips for beginner students of Mandarin, if anyone's interested: https://matkline.medium.com/7-pieces-of-advice-for-a-beginning-student-of-chinese-8d1eb1f36e1a https://matkline.medium.com/7-pieces-of-advice-for-a-beginni...
kang_li 2y ago
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snozolli 2y ago
I happened to watch a snippet of the anime Demon Slayer in an obscure Chinese fan dub. Ironically, this caught my attention. How is that ironic?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
whispersnow 2y ago
The Chinese translation of those sub titles are pretty decent! Great achievement in just 365 days!
seanmcdirmid 2y ago
I took a break during my PhD and lived in China for half a year taking Chinese lessons. I wasn’t so diligent but it got me to some fluency at least, and got me out of a funk that allowed me to finish my PhD eventually.

502 points by misiti3780 2y ago

This is really impressive. Its not an easy language > 1 hour of Chinese content before sleep, e.g. anime dubs or books There are also anime (donghua) originating entirely in China. I think those might be more helpful than Anime dubs since the content fits better with the language. Swallowed Star, 斗罗大陆, and 一人之下 are pretty fun.

kainduhh 2y ago
[flagged]
kulahan 2y ago
I've come across so many donghua that seem really cool, but the English translations are just so bad. Could be a cool way to get a little further into their culture.
- _lvbh 2y ago
  I think immerison is a pretty good way of learning a language. When consuming content without crutches like subtitles, you take in a lot more. I basically learnt Hokkien over the past few years by just listening to people speak it a ton and trying to match the context.

vunderba 2y ago

I commend the author's discipline - this is a pretty standard approach. TLDR - Move as many things as possible in regular life to the target language (software, tv shows, reading, etc) to maintain the language - There is no substitute for full immersion if you have the opportunity. I learned traditional Chinese in Taiwan while I was an ESL teacher. - The power of SRS (spaced repetition system) cannot be overstated I will add my own bit to it. If you like mnemonic systems, Heisig wrote a very good book called "Remembering Traditional Hanzi" where the idea is to use the radicals in the character to construct a visual image to aid in recall. I highly recommend it. https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/remembering-traditional-hanzi-1-how-not-to-forget-the-meaning-and-writing-of-chinese-characters https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/remembering-traditional-han...

wccrawford 2y ago
Do you mean "cannot be overstated"? "Cannot be understated" means you can't talk badly enough about it. "Cannot be overstated" would mean it's impossible to talk too highly of it.
- vunderba 2y ago
  Updated! Guess I traded a bit of my fluency in English for Chinese. :p
alexawarrior4 2y ago
"The power of SRS (spaced repetition system) cannot be overstated" For an alternative take, there is at least some evidence that SRS is entirely unnecessary and can even hinder language learning. I know it at least is not required by first language speakers, and have also seen many examples of fluent second and third language speakers who never use SRS, or any other kind of "practiced" language acquisition such as learning vocabulary, grammar, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis For instance here's a PhD thesis of someone who learned French to fluency with only watching TV and (later) reading books: https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:9b49365 https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:9b49365
- vunderba 2y ago
  One of the points in Input Hypothesis is something I'm sure everybody would agree with: This states that learners progress in their knowledge of the language when they comprehend language input that is slightly more advanced than their current level. Krashen called this level of input "i+1", where "i" is the learner's interlanguage and "+1" is the next stage of language acquisition. Informally I've always called it "walking the knife's edge" - you have to be always on the slight edge of feeling uncomfortable to realize meaningful gains. I mean it makes logical sense. The brain is ALWAYS trying to optimize away through chunking/patterns/etc. so you have to be constantly challenging it. It's the reason why there's a huge skill difference between a driver at one month vs 1 year, but a far less difference between a driver at one year vs ten years.

bluechair 2y ago

It might be helpful to someone, so I’m suggesting something similar for Spanish: * https://www.dreamingspanish.com https://www.dreamingspanish.com

kklisura 2y ago
Anything similar for Japanese?
- kentosi-dw 2y ago
  Yes if you type "japanese conversation" in youtube you'll get lots of people mirroring this format. (Sorry at work and youtube is locked for me).
- willmorrison 2y ago
  Take a look at https://refold.link/Japanese_resources https://refold.link/Japanese_resources
  - joshdavham 2y ago
    I can vouch. I followed the Refold method to learn French and am also following it for Japanese.
- joshdavham 2y ago
  Yes! You should checkout https://cijapanese.com/ https://cijapanese.com/ It's an awesome site with just under 1,000 videos. There are also transcripts and a time tracker to help track your progress. Note I'm not affiliated, but am just a happy user. (Also my friend is the site developer)
- famouswaffles 2y ago
  https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page#Japanese https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page#Japanese

edent 2y ago

While I haven't the same proficiency, I had the same "local celebrity" experience when visiting Beijing. While it is fun at first seeing people double take and then ask to take a photo with you - it gets old fast! Mind you, I'll never tire of (partially) understanding what people say about me when they think I don't understand. One thing not mentioned is that it is often a good idea to have some formal testing. Friends and tutors may overlook your mistakes. A dispassionate exam board likely won't.

iforgotpassword 2y ago
Are you not white or otherwise have unusual features? I'm a random white dude and I've been to Beijing and Shanghai many times over the past 15 years, and while I was asked for a photo a few times at parks or touristy places, it was far from feeling like a celeb or anything. And it has gotten less and less over the past years, but maybe that's because I'm getting older and more boring. :)
- hangonhn 2y ago
  You need to leave Beijing and especially Shanghai and head farther inland to regain your celebrity status! I (ethnic Chinese) went to China with two friends from Texas in the early 2010s. One of them has long blonde hair. She was never stopped in Shanghai, a couple of times in Beijing, but in Chengdu, they were just so amazed by her and her husband (but mostly her and her long blonde hair). People wanted to take pictures with my friends. Maybe things have changed a lot since then but worth a try! Chengdu is definitely worth visiting and I'm sure there are many very interesting more inland cities in China to visit (and maybe be a celebrity for a moment).
  - iforgotpassword 2y ago
    Yes, going to smaller cities has always been on my list but never worked out. I did Tianjin and Qingdao last and this year, but they are still too big it seems. Stayed three days both times and there was nothing more than a few stares.
  - 2y ago

stuxfian 2y ago

Nice

kentosi-dw 2y ago

The importance of an SRS system like Anki cannot be overstated. However I can see how this might be a burden to some when it comes to entering in your own sentences. For this, I highly recommend making use of your OS's dictation (speech to text) feature. You get to practice speaking _and_ enter sentences much quicker.

Trufa 2y ago
I'm learning Indonesian the right way after having learned German in the wrongest possible way and ANKI is just amazing for language learning, 4 months in and I'm having basic conversations.
- alanwreath 2y ago
  Sorry maybe this is the wrong question. But with regard to ANKI (all caps) are referring to some app?
  - keiferski 2y ago
    https://apps.ankiweb.net https://apps.ankiweb.net
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
thatsnotmepls 2y ago
I have ChatGPT create 20 sentences for a new word I want to learn, works super well with Anki. Front -> Word. Click button, shows random sentence out of 20. Back -> Word and sentence translation.
- cblum 2y ago
  The trouble with ChatGPT is that it can produce wonky sentences sometimes, and as a learner it can be hard to validate that. Most of the time it’s great though, just need to be cautious and ideally find a way to validate the content it generates (in my case I can run it by my wife). I use ChatGPT to check my answers to the exercises in my textbooks :)

cyberlimerence 2y ago

I don't know Mandarin, but I found this browser extension [1] very useful for quickly translating some words. It doesn't translate sentences unfortunately, but I guess you can use machine translation for that. I'm curious if/how anyone here has integrated LLMs for their language learning process. Also after you learn a certain amount of basic words in any language, I recommend trying to learn that language from inside out. Basically instead of translating new words to your primary language, look for a dictionary which will explain those words with basic ones you already know. [1] https://github.com/cschiller/zhongwen https://github.com/cschiller/zhongwen

jimmywetnips 2y ago
GPT has been a godsend. For basically being a very competent super knowledgeable tutor of every single language. So if I have some weird question about some language mechanism I can ask it in the domain that I know which is English or a romance language and it will do some compare and contrast. I can ask it about the etymology of the word and the development of certain verbs which helps me to really remember things. The way that it knows what you mean because it has such a vast knowledge base but also the fact that it is an expert in both source and target languages, and how nowadays with voice chat it speaks it with a correct accent means there's really nothing else like it to be honest Like, is there potentially a human being who can surpass the abilities of GPT in this domain? Absolutely but that particular professor or tutor needs to not only be native proficient in both languages, speak both without accidents, but also be patient and understand what you're trying to ask without any judgment. And now try to do that for one to N language pairs and basically the talent pool shrinks to zero. Oh and you want it on demand to scratch a curious itch while driving down the road. No human can offer this service.
mncharity 2y ago
> integrated LLMs for their language learning process Fwiw, TFA's methods page[1] has a GPT section. [1] https://isaak.net/mandarinmethods/#use-gpt https://isaak.net/mandarinmethods/#use-gpt
mncharity 2y ago
> browser extension I've pondered doing a browser extension which invasively replaces bits of english web text with some other language(s). Mousing to get english (which also signals I haven't learned that bit yet), and spoken, and discussion. Bit selection probabilistic on commonness (in both the language and the web page), and on learning. Plus an "I want to learn this bit" list. A replacement aggressiveness slider for "not now please". Basically making all web pages into code-switching polyglots, and shifting general web surfing into an "always learning something" zone.

alberth 2y ago

Different language, but I’d highly recommend Tokyo Vice as a tv show. The main actor, Ansel Elgort, learned Japanese in 1-month time. https://malaysia.news.yahoo.com/ansel-elgort-learned-japanese-four-043943978.html https://malaysia.news.yahoo.com/ansel-elgort-learned-japanes... Granted he probably was learning more pronunciation to say his lines. But Japanese actors on set have commented at how surprised they were in his mastery of the language off camera in such a short amount of time.

joshdavham 2y ago
I'm not familiar with the show, but, you can't learn any language in one month. That is a myth. The reason for this is actually mathematical. To understand a language you need to know at least a couple thousand words and you can't realistically learn thousands of words in a month. That takes time.
- pastage 2y ago
  The state department says 88 weeks for Japanese[1]. A month is a long time with full immersion, getting the basics right will get you far enough that people will help you with the rest. I could communicate relatively well with two weeks of immersion but I did not finnish learning it in 100 weeks. [1] https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/ https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/
  - FranzFerdiNaN 2y ago
    Yeah I highly doubt you could “communicate fairly well” in Japanese after two weeks. You might have memorized some standard phrases, sure. But two weeks would not even be enough when going from Dutch to German or English to French.
    - joshdavham 2y ago
      It's unfortunate, but I think these "I learned x language in y weeks/months" memes are probably here to stay. After spending the last year becoming technical (data science -> software eng) and seeing all those "I learned to program in 3 months and got a job at Google" videos, I'm convinced that this is just the dunning kruger effect of not knowing enough about the subject to understand how long it takes to become competent. Furthermore the "I learned x in y time" meme is almost always perpetuated by false beginners. I remember seeing an "I learned Italian in one week" video where the guy actually knew some Italian beforehand. He also had previously learned fluent French and Spanish beforehand, so to say he learned Italian from scratch is a huge stretch.

CollinEMac 2y ago

I'm always surprised when people mention watching shows in their target language as a study method. For me, I don't understand much and my mind starts to wander pretty quickly.

alexawarrior4 2y ago
I had the same problem, the solution is to start with extremely easy content, either from a language learning site/channel or content targeted at toddlers. Even 2 year olds already have quite advanced language skills! Peppa Pig is a perennial favorite. You build up from there with childrens' shows, cartoons, and at some point later on introduce graded readers. Watching full-speed native TV shows is like the final exam after 1500+ hours of study, and even then may have a lot not understood if you aren't familiar with the slang/dialect. This is especially true for heavily dialectical languages such as Chinese where it's common to always watch with subtitles on.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  Besides watching things aimed at young children, another tactic I have found effective is to watch something you already know very well in English (or whatever your native language). For me, this has been South Park. I'll watch episodes that I practically know by heart already, so that even if I don't understand all the Spanish words I can pick up things from knowing what is happening.
  - hyperG 2y ago
    Thanks. That is a really great idea.
joshdavham 2y ago
There are five tricks I'd recommend to stay focused. 1. Try watching something that is actually interesting. Often this could be something you'd like to rewatch that you've seen before, but now dubbed in your target language. 2. Try watching something that you understand. Search "[target language] comprehensible input". This content has been simplified for people like you. 3. Focus on what you DO understand, not what you don't understand. Not only does this not weigh you down, it also give you something to focus on. 4. Pop bubble wrap (or something). Watching a TV show is effectively "doing nothing" and this makes some people uncomfortable (sorta like struggling to meditate). If you can find something to do while you're "doing nothing", this can help a lot!

wwarner 2y ago

Best anki testimonial that I've read.

cynicalpeace 2y ago

I hitchhiked China for 3 months in 2018 after studying Chinese for 2 semesters of college beforehand. Hitchhiking is by far one of the best ways to learn a new language. Long hours with a wide variety of individuals, mostly one-on-one. If you're young, and you're reading this, go hitchhike. It's not as safe as staying home with mom, but it's not as dangerous as people who have never done it say it is. I "achieved intermediate fluency" during that time. But it's gone now. If you don't use it, you lose it.

vunderba 2y ago
Or go teach. Barrier to entry to becoming an ESL teacher particularly in southeast Asia is relatively low, and its the best way to integrate into the culture.
- cynicalpeace 2y ago
  I don't have first hand experience with that, but it seems that might actually be a poor way to learn, because everyone will want to speak English to you. I've had to selfishly refuse to speak English to people many times.
  - vunderba 2y ago
    Everyone in your class of course, but its not like you're wearing a tag that say "English Teacher" when you're just walking around. I also bypassed this pretty easily, my extended family / name is Italian, so I would always respond back in Italian, and then we'd revert to Chinese pretty quickly because NOBODY speaks Italian over there. Further since you're there on a work visa, you can eventually transition into translation work / etc. to really refine your language mastery. 3 months isn't bad, but I'd recommend a solid year. Following my time in Asia, I lived in Russia where I basically didn't use my Chinese for a couple years, but on a quick business trip to Taipei my fluency was there when I needed it.
    - cynicalpeace 2y ago
      lol nice trick with the Italian. I'd say to master any language there is no period of time that is sufficient. I've even gotten worse at speaking my native language since I speak Spanish all day. Like with exercise, or brushing your teeth, once you stop doing it, it will get worse and you will lose "it".

refactor_master 2y ago

Plug for this tool I’ve been using for SRS: https://hanzihero.com/ https://hanzihero.com/ Yes, it costs a bit of money every month, but it’s incredibly polished and fun (well, for the first couple of thousands of characters) to use. For a language with so many speakers it’s quite evident that Mandarin lacks the cultural foothold that Japanese has gained in the West. Good resources and community aimed at non-natives trying to learn are really few and far in between.

comboy 2y ago
Do they have anything in common with Mandarin Blueprint? It seems to use very similar mnemonics. How far did the tool get you?
- refactor_master 2y ago
  I haven’t used Mandarin Blueprint so I can’t say. I think the mnemonics of Hanzi Hero are a bit hit or miss. They’re sometimes overly detailed compared to Wanikani which I’ve also used (for Japanese), which makes them just as hard to remember as the characters themselves sometimes. Overall the SRS and the polish took me to about 1200 characters in 6 months.

lxe 2y ago

I don't think I can do SRS. My dopamine system is at a point where I can't do anything for a long time that isn't interesting, has immediate or intermediate rewards, or can capture attention for a long time. And on top of that, repeating that habit requires all these criteria. Examples: Scrolling on the phone?: Basically direct dopamine injected into my brain. Can do indefinitely. Not good. Programming? Sure I can put a few hours in, or even days if building quick prototypes where the payoff is imminent. Reading? Can go on indefinitely, depending on the book: it's just continual stream of interesting immersive stuff Exercise? Well that depends on the activity. Running indoors without any stimulation: absolutely cannot do. Cycling or running or walking outside with an audiobook, or music? Absolutely: constant stimulation plus endorphins. Learning Piano? Only if I can bang out a few good tunes immediately in the session, then I can allow myself to struggle with the difficult stuff in between. Absolutely cannot and won't do rote deliberate practice. This hinders my progress significantly, but at least I have fun. Learning a language? Well, unless I can get imminent rewards, or be continually interested and engaged, there's just no way I'll be able to do this. And I feel like rote, deliberate practice is just impossible for me to build a habit out of. One way I know for a fact that I can learn another language is through necessity to communicate with it. Let's say I'm thrown into an environment where the ONLY way I can get anything done is through having to communicate directly, without the aid of translators or tools. I think this is how babies learn.

hintymad 2y ago
> I don't think I can do SRS No need. :-) Comprehensible Input and immersive language usage can be your superpower.
- pessimizer 2y ago
  With old-school graded readers. Turns out that the people in past centuries who we ridiculed for their antiquated approaches for learning languages all spoke multiple languages. They didn't have comic books, though, which are another good source of interesting reading material that also comes with elaborate visual hints to what is being said. If I were trying to learn Mandarin, I'd scour the internet for bootleg scans of Jademan comics from the 80s.

cmuguythrow 2y ago

I’ve been learning Mandarin via Comprehensible Input (CI) for about 9 months and really admire OP’s dedication and consistency. In the first 4-5 months of being truly consistent with ~1hr a day of Anki and Peppa pig I got to around 2,000 words and was able to have a great experience when I traveled to Taiwan, so I can vouch for the core methodology in this post. It’s not “easy”, but it’s definitely the most effective way to learn a foreign language that I know of. The CI community has come a long way in the last ~5 or so years - the general consensus looks a lot like OP’s methods, which I would summarize as: 1. Brute force [premade Anki flashcard decks](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/810519009 https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/810519009) for the first ~1k most common words 2. Start watching comprehensible input as soon as you can, ideally for an hour a day or more 3. [Sentence mine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBcQJESGQvc)the https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBcQJESGQvc)the comprehensible input and add it to the daily SRS flashcard grind The best summary of these methods that I’ve found is https://refold.la/ https://refold.la/ Self plug: I’ve been working on a way to generate Mandarin audio comprehensible input using LLMs/TTS models. The idea is that there aren’t many great CI options between 500 words and ~3k-5k words - OP himself mentions that when he started watching Scissor Seven 刺客伍六七 he barely understood anything, which is pretty hard to “push through” without some hardcore willpower. My project https://plusonechinese.com https://plusonechinese.com makes Mandarin audio stories that are 85% comprehensible at any level from 400 words all the way to 8k or more words and then auto-imports the audio snippets into SRS flashcards, which makes a CI workflow like this a lot easier to engage with at a lower level and without advanced willpower. Still working on making the content _truly_ interesting, but would love some feedback!

shubb 2y ago
I was hoping to find something like your app. Haven't tried it yet but so excited!
15kingben 2y ago
DuChinese is a great app for reading stories at beginner levels of vocabulary. It also supports tap-to-lookup and saving words to flashcards, but unfortunately they don't integrate with Anki, only their own app's system.

1stub 2y ago

Learning a language through input is incredibly effective and in my eyes much more enjoyable than the traditional classroom approach. For myself with Japanese it was after ~6 months of immersion and SRS that things really started to click and it became much more enjoyable.

hintymad 2y ago

A side topic, for those who have acquired Mandarin, do you think Chinese is a really easy-to-learn language in the long run? Yes, learning all the characters has a steep learning curve, but once one passes that stage, it's all about combination of the characters. That Chinese's grammar is heavily influenced by modern English also helped. I feel that the grammatical similarity between English and Chinese is closer than that between English and Spanish.

subarctic 2y ago
Is it similar to English? The one thing I remember is there's no tenses or gender.
- hintymad 2y ago
  That's the simplified part. Otherwise, the basic structure of the two languages is subject + verb + object. A lot of semantics are constructed with the help of adverbs and particles without verb conjugations. For example, in English we say I have done that, and in Chinese we say 我做了(Or in Taiwan style，我有做了，which is even closer to English, though I'm not sure if that's from Japanese's やったことがありません). In contrast, in Spanish we'd say Lo he hecho - different sentence order, and tons of verb conjugation.
indigo945 2y ago
Yes, learning all the characters has a steep learning curve, but once one passes that stage, ... One never passes that stage, though? Even once you know the 6,000 characters that people often cite as being needed to read a novel, you'll still run into characters that you don't know (especially in proper names, but also in less common, especially literary or chengyu, vocabulary). I also disagree about the "grammatical similarity", but at the point of fluency we're talking about here (day-to-day fluency in idiomatic Chinese), that doesn't matter anyway, not even a bit.
- g9yuayon 2y ago
  An elementary student in China probably won't learn more than 3000 characters, yet they can read advanced novels. I suspect the difference is that a native speaker feels more comfortable skipping or guess unknown words. I certainly felt more discomfort when encountering new words when reading even a popular fiction in English, while having no problem guessing the meaning of a new word in my native language.

gwintrob 2y ago

Love this :) Does anyone have similar experience learning Cantonese? I've been using Anki for a couple months now and it's great. ChatGPT and Claude have been a big help but they do sometimes get confused with Mandarin or go to a more "formal" Cantonese that sounds very traditional.

ilamont 2y ago

I really like the focus on watching or listening to source materials every day. This is where Duolingo fails, or at least how my SO uses it. It becomes a game for listening to snippets and remembering vocabulary, not actual comprehension of language spoken by native speakers. For anyone who is a student, I highly recommend the National Taiwan Normal University (師大) Mandarin Training Center summer sessions. The materials are developed and taught by well-trained teachers. It's completely immersive in the classroom, and it can be applied on the street every day you're there. They have programs for younger kids and middle school students (which my kids took some years back) as well as college and graduate students (http://www.mtc.ntnu.edu.tw/eng/course-seasonal.htm http://www.mtc.ntnu.edu.tw/eng/course-seasonal.htm).

comboy 2y ago
There are apps now that provide you with listening material improving your comprehension while also doing some SRS on it. Superchinese focuses on pronunciation a lot, Clozemaster on listening. HelloChinese and ChineseSkill are more duolingo-like but way better for Mandarin. And Untamed ("Leaving soon") is still on Netflix, it may seem cheesy but out of things I tried watching it has surprisingly clean, easy to understand language with lots of common phrases while also offering some interesting story.

triyambakam 2y ago

In case anyone reads this, soon or in the far off future... I really don't like Anki from a design perspective, but the technique behind it is great. I've really been enjoying Mochi [1] as an alternative. I am not affiliated, just an unpaid shill for a good app. [1] https://mochi.cards/ https://mochi.cards/

yorozu 2y ago

> I want to reach a level where the legendary Three-Body Problem will be comfortably readable. Good goal. I read the Three Body Problem in Chinese as a non-native speaker. It was challenging for me compared to other (non sci-fi) books due to the quantity and breadth of scientific jargon, but very enjoyable.

Balgair 2y ago

For those of you like me that had never heard of Bloom's 2 Sigma effect : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem "Bloom's 2 sigma problem refers to the educational phenomenon that the average student tutored one-to-one using mastery learning techniques performed two standard deviations better than students educated in a classroom environment." Um, what?! Why the hell am I not doing this for myself?

aidenn0 2y ago
Every single person I know who graduated college before 20 had a significant amount of their primary and/or secondary education somewhere along those lines. Sure, they were all also of above average intelligence, but most of them by not more than about 1 standard deviation. The schools around here are moving in a diametrically opposed direction to mastery learning by making sure every student is in the same class regardless of past performance (no honors classes, no remedial classes, no testing into advanced math &c.). The result was entirely predictable to pretty much everybody except the administrators who came up with this policy.

segmondy 2y ago

Dude is not your average human tho. Read their about page. In the recent past: I skipped out of high school in rural Austria to graduate early In a gap year, I spun up a $1M non-profit and ran the most viral tech conference of the year, featuring Sam Altman, Daniela Amodei, 3Blue1Brown, Veritasium and more. Worked through 4000 papers and self-taught roughly an undergrad's worth of biology in a year, then cold-emailed myself into Oxford to do neuroimmunology Self-taught Mandarin in a year to fluency Got interested in math and did a math undergrad at Berkeley in two years

rahimnathwani 2y ago

If you're doing all these things already, but want something for learning to write characters, Skritter is the best thing I know of. I used it many years ago (on a Windows PC using a Wacom tablet). Now my son is using the more modern iPad version. It uses spaced repetition, and you can ratchet up the difficulty as needed. In the default mode, for each stroke you make correctly, it will perfect its shape and position. This often results in an inadvertent hint. You can turn it off so it only ever shows the strokes exactly as you wrote them.

ximeng 2y ago
I’d second this. I learned to read and write Chinese through (around 2000 hours) of Skritter. It’s a lot easier to get conversational with a solid vocabulary too. And being able to efficiently study in any free time really helps.

daft_pink 2y ago

Thanks this is awesome. My wife is chinese and I’m going to try and copy some of your methods.

wantsanagent 2y ago

I don't care about learning Mandarin, I want to find out how this guy's motivation system works and then download it into my brain. Doing a PhD and learning Mandarin as a side project?! Doing hours of Anki practice and new note taking, some of it while running on a treadmill? There's just a crazy amount of drive (and what sounds like an epic memory) here. I don't think people consider base motivation enough when thinking about processes and this guy won some kind of biological and/or upbringing lottery.

musicale 2y ago
https://structuredprocrastination.com https://structuredprocrastination.com See also "The Art of Procrastination" (2012).
- spongebobism 2y ago
  Thanks, that was a great read and resonates a lot with me. Looking back, most of my learning new languages, getting in shape, playing the guitar, and making new friends was structured procrastination.
deleted 2y ago
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layman51 2y ago
It’s interesting that you mention motivation/drive on a post like this. I have similar thoughts whenever there are posts about personalized learning technology or improving public education.
trhway 2y ago
>download it into my brain "it" is the youth. The guy looks to be mid-20ies. Back then in those years i could go for 3 days without sleep while working, studying, drinking, etc. and many of my friends and classmates at the University were similar.
- seper8 2y ago

modeless 2y ago

I started a spaced repetition program for Mandarin, and I can see that it works well. Even though it's the fastest way, it still takes a discouraging amount of time and it is no fun at all. I don't know if the process can ever be made any faster, but I am hopeful that AI agents will soon be able to at least make it a lot more enjoyable.

beezlebroxxxxxx 2y ago
I learned French from 2021-2023 by taking weekly lessons. Before then I'd dabbled in all kinds of methods like Anki and tapes. Nothing works like having private or small class lessons with a teacher who can immediately correct you. Nothing. I went from barely able to speak or conjugate, to having conversations with my french colleagues, telling jokes, and reading novels, in French. If you have the means, taking lessons is, at least for me, wildly more entertaining, fulfilling, and better than trying to go alone. I'm not affiliated at all, but using iTalki can really be a game-changer if you're trying to get conversational. A language is used and using the language over and over in conversations is the best method for learning and getting better at one.

kjellsbells 2y ago

This is impressive and inspiring. Not to detract at all from his dedication, but it really helps that there are so many content/resources in the target language: news, kids shows, anime, tutors, emigrant diaspora. As a side quest, look at another reputedly-hard language like Vietnamese, where there is not nearly so much. As an example, Google and Microsoft Translator apps speak different variants of Vietnamese (Northern and Southern respectively), and (because they are trained statistically on whatever limited corpuses are available) they seem strangely limited in what they can do/how accurate they are.

famouswaffles 2y ago
You should try any of the SOTA LLMs (4o, Claude, Gemini) for translation rather than Google/Microsoft Translate. They are much better.
- blakedzc 2y ago
  In my experience, if you ask 4o or Claude for the definition of a word, they can fumble the tone and get meanings of toneless words mixed up. For instance, when prompted for the meaning of "da", it correctly provides skin, but also provides "already", which is a confusion with "đã". I don't believe I had any notable difference in error rate between Claude and 4o, and it's looking like I will create a system to have someone manually review what is generated. My main motivation for working on this is that there is such a drought of materials. SOTA LLMs are certainly great and have a pretty good effectiveness, but I wouldn't say they make great teachers of more obscure languages yet. I recall the Llama models explicitly state what languages the model is proficient in.
spongebobism 2y ago
And Vietnamese is still one of the luckier languages out there, having a nation state behind it with all the media that comes along with it. A large majority of the world's languages don't even have that.

blisterpeanuts 2y ago

Very fun blog to read, especially since I've been through a somewhat related though far less rigorous experience; a China major, spent 2 years in Taiwan while undergrad, then 2 years grad school, 7 years total studying modern Mandarin, classical Chinese, and some dialects (mostly Taiwanese i.e. Minnan dialect, and some Cantonese). The key, in my experience, is having a young brain. Chinese is different from a Western phonetic language and I believe the characters are stored in a different part of the brain than are, for example, English words. Perhaps in an image processing center. Others smarter than I could probably correct & expand on this. When I was 20, I could learn dozens or hundreds of characters a week. Decades later, that ability has faded. I've never had a very good memory, though, so maybe others are still able to absorb and retain the characters (and character combinations) at an older age. Isaak seems exceptionally bright, to judge by his "About" page which is kind of amazing. But possibly his best tactic has been to immerse himself maximally, force himself to watch Chinese-dubbed anime, get his teacher to teach in Mandarin, and go to the country itself and spend all day speaking to people which in the long run is the way to really get the spoken language down, complementing all those characters you're stuffing into your head.

freemany 2y ago
thank you for the kind words!

Always42 2y ago

Any equivalent resources for spanish?

msvan 2y ago

I kind of see myself from ten years ago in this blog post! I also obsessively studied Mandarin Chinese in my late teens for the sheer fun of it, before doing a math undergrad. I even wrote comments on Hacker News about it a decade ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7622940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7622940. At the time I had seemingly limitless motivation for grinding away on flashcards and other learning materials. My progress was strong and I passed the HSK6 after a year and a half or so of studying, which at the time was the highest level of certification offered. I think they changed the system since and added more levels beyond 6. You can do amazing things if you're dedicated! Today my Chinese is absolutely unusable, and my views on China have soured to the extent that I don't really want to revive my old skills. My takeaway is that learning one of these languages, the CJK languages, Arabic, or similarly weird languages, is just too much effort and I don't think it's worth it. I clearly had a lot of excess energy at the time that I could've directed towards something better. Knowing Chinese is about as useful as juggling and you might as well get really good at juggling if you're bored. It'll save you a few thousand hours.

crazygringo 2y ago
> Today my Chinese is absolutely unusable Something similar happened to me -- did intensive Mandarin study in college followed by a summer in Beijing being totally immersed. Was incredible. Then continued with a language course back home, and watched as my vocabulary shrank -- something like 4 hrs/wk. of class (with homework on top) couldn't even maintain my Mandarin, much less improve it. Today I can't understand a thing -- I've literally forgotten it all except for counting to ten and some basic phrases. In hindsight, it was utterly wasted effort, except for the cultural benefits of the summer abroad. In contrast, I can understand and get by in French and Spanish and Italian just fine, despite having studied those far less. If I'm traveling somewhere I just do a quick review of verb conjugations beforehand. But they just share so many cognates with English. When television is télévision or televisión or televisione it's just not that hard. But when television is diànshì, and virtually every word is brand-new like that... it's just not worth it. (And even when you learn a new word in e.g. Spanish that's totally different from English, you'll often get it "for free" in another one -- e.g. "pretend" is fingir in Spanish, and fingere in Italian.)

nojs 2y ago

This is an impressive achievement. > Frequency-based learning. Comprehensible input. Reading lots as soon as I could, especially graded readers. Reading content that personally interests you is very important and often underrated. The "emotional connection" to what you're reading helps learning a lot. There’s a lot of potential to improve the reading experience for Chinese. I recently built a syntax-highlighting tool [1] that helps you understand arbitrary text, which I have found quite helpful. If you are based in Taiwan and interested in working in this space, hit me up! My email is in my profile. 1. https://dragonmandarin.com/reader https://dragonmandarin.com/reader

dluan 2y ago

I've been studying again for the past 6 months after going probably 10 years without putting in any effort. I quickly picked it back up, breezing through HSK 2 and 3, and now just about to be at HSK 5 soon. At times it feels daunting just going off the recommended number of hours needed to get to HSK 6 (5,760 hours), but it's actually been flying way faster than I expected. It's actually pretty great language for self-study once you get to a good enough foundation. It's really endless and there's so many rabbit holes to get stuck in - ancient literary language especially. I'm excited to try and get deeper in to that. My ultimate goal is to be able to read the Big 4 novels confidently. It's also one of the weird things where motivation has a real snowball effect. The more you know, the more it feels like you can do, the more doors it opens for exploring entirely new areas. It helps that with Chinese there's so much that feels locked up or hidden from normal western view. Want to learn about tea production, culture, and history? Need to learn Chinese. Want to better understand Japanese kanji and history? Need to learn Chinese. Trying to grasp all the distinct geographic dialects and idiosyncrasies is tricky. Also the fact that a quarter of the planet kind of lives and operates on a separate internet, and the FOMO I felt by not being able to understand that. Anyways, 10/10 definitely recommend. My plan is to keep chugging through and get to HSK 6 studying after my newborn infant arrives in 2 months, though I don't know if I can keep up the 10 hours a week I'm currently managing. I'm also doing elementary Japanese at a way more casual pace with local classes, and my Spanish has disintegrated to barely being usable. There are so many more helpful tools and communities that exist now than 10-20 years ago, like chrome extensions and better repetition tools, though I still enjoy just handwriting in a notebook a bunch.

cblum 2y ago
> My plan is to keep chugging through and get to HSK 6 studying after my newborn infant arrives in 2 months, though I don't know if I can keep up the 10 hours a week I'm currently managing. I have a 5-month old baby and I can tell you it’s possible to keep your language learning going, but you’ll have to be more intentional or even forceful about it. Before my son was born I studied/immersed almost all day except when I was working or hanging out with my wife (and often the latter still counted as immersion since she’s Chinese :) and we’d watch Chinese TV shows together). After he was born time became si significantly more limited, but I was (am) determined to keep learning the language. Here’s some of what I do: - I could drive 15 minutes to work, but instead I take public transit. That helps me accomplish two things: daily exercise walking to and from the station, and time to listen to podcasts or audiobooks (in Chinese, of course). Once I’m on the bus/train, I’ll either do Anki or a Hello Chinese lesson. - I try to go to the office as early as possible on any given day, and use the extra time before work to study. I could do this at home, but it’s quieter in the office. - Most days I’ll spend my whole lunch break on language learning. - I stick to all of this even on days when the baby kept us up all night long. Some important things to bring up: - This all comes at the expense of not having time for any other interests. I have a whole backlog of sci-fi books and other material I’d love to read, but I choose to prioritize learning Mandarin. - I’m paying a price when it comes to making connections at work. Spending my whole lunch hour on learning means I stopped joining coworkers for lunch. Although right now I also don’t join them to minimize potential exposure to sickness that I could bring home and pass to the baby. - This can also be detrimental to job performance. I could be putting in more time on learning job-related stuff or simply getting more done, but again, I consider learning Mandarin a priority. - Other than Anki, I don’t do any learning on weekends. There’s just no time or opportunity to do so. Not sure if any of this will apply or be doable to you. A lot of it will also come down to your family situation and your relationship with your partner. In my case, I’m lucky that she’s very supportive of my interest in her language. Good luck! The baby will be a ton of work but also a ton of fun and love :D

hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago

Xiomanyc enters the chat.

105424 2y ago

I would be very interested in the ANKI megadeck. I have spend quite some time cleaning up and testing out different ANKI decks in Chinese and i need quite a motivated day to extend or create new ones. I had a similar "local celebrity" experience while traveling with another dutch person around Hubei, people would ask us for pictures at stores because we where the first foreigner to ever be there. Interestingly i thought it was quite positive as i felt the interest of people was a mix between curiosity and excitement to show of their culture while my friends experience was quite negative as he thought the interest was coming from prejudice or negativity. Great example of how 2 people experiencing the same thing can have very different take always and how what you bring to a place is usually what you get back from it.

freemany 2y ago
isaak.net/mandarinmethods

AlchemistCamp 2y ago

The stated goal of comfortably reading 三體 (3 body problem) is a tough one. The first chapter is full of Cultural Revolution era vocabulary and later parts of the book contain a lot of science / philosophy jargon. If he can read that book comfortably, without researching and speed-running its exact vocabulary, then I'd say he's definitely an advanced learner.

baby 2y ago
I gave up in the first paragraph

est 2y ago

offtopic, I really hope Duolingo adopt some aspect of Anki.

closetkantian 2y ago

I agree with a lot of the author's recommendations. Here are my 7 tips for beginner students of Mandarin, if anyone's interested: https://matkline.medium.com/7-pieces-of-advice-for-a-beginning-student-of-chinese-8d1eb1f36e1a https://matkline.medium.com/7-pieces-of-advice-for-a-beginni...

kang_li 2y ago

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snozolli 2y ago

I happened to watch a snippet of the anime Demon Slayer in an obscure Chinese fan dub. Ironically, this caught my attention. How is that ironic?

deleted 2y ago
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whispersnow 2y ago

The Chinese translation of those sub titles are pretty decent! Great achievement in just 365 days!

seanmcdirmid 2y ago

I took a break during my PhD and lived in China for half a year taking Chinese lessons. I wasn’t so diligent but it got me to some fluency at least, and got me out of a funk that allowed me to finish my PhD eventually.