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.
Do not underestimate the urge to procrastinate (by still doing productive things, like learning Mandarin) while pursuing a PhD.
I am not sure if this will be the author's experience too, but pursuing a PhD will often leave you exhausted without any hope of ever finding "the final missing ingredient" to solve the problem you are currently tackling. So turning to entirely unrelated problems, however productive they may seem to outsides, suddenly becomes an attractive alternative in order to procrastinate.
I wrote my own dynamic keyboard layout to optimize typing speed while procrastinating on my dissertation.
15 years later I'm still using it. My dissertation not so much.
Procrastination is (sometimes) awesome.
Structured procrastination is highly underrated.
Sounds like custom hot-keys in a video game
Dynamic keyboard layout?
What is that? The keys change place?
Probably using a QMK firmware-based keyboard where you can access different layers and shortcuts.
I'm using one right now (though mine runs off ZMK which is similar but wireless) which is a split with just 42 keys. The rest--numbers, symbols, function keys, etc. are all under layers. The layout is dynamic because holding down different keys makes the layout 'change' as you do so. Holding down the left spacebar and pressing 'Z' sends 'F1' to the computer while holding down another key on the right half turns my WER/SDF/XCV keys into a Numpad, etc.
Side effect, no one knows your passwords, even if they watch you type!
I am currently learning to color grade, am an active bedroom musician, enjoy cooking and learning about food science, and am training for my first half marathon alongside my PhD. The side project thing is definitely real.
haha, so true. I had the same experience while in graduate school.
Having something to procrastinate on is half the reason I’m going to grad school while working full time.
It truly is an excellent hack.
Same here. I don't know how to fix my PhD, so let me just make my sponsor's code run faster and make a hundreds of open source PRs...
> Doing hours of Anki practice and new note taking, some of it while running on a treadmill?
I studied with Anki on long 1hr walks and it worked incredibly well for me. I’d definitely recommend trying it!
Some things I learned were DS/algos, Greek alphabet pronunciation (so that I could read math symbols), the periodic table/chemical properties, and misc LeetCode interviewing stuff.
> DS/algos
How do you study that on Anki?
I started with these decks:
https://github.com/teivah/algodeck
https://github.com/teivah/designdeck
Essentially I'd have a question like "invert a binary tree", "implement union-find", or "structure of a topological sort". All of these are small enough that I can keep them in my head.
For small algorithms I would just regurgitate the code line-for-line in my head. For more complex ones I would just go over the structure (not actual code), e.g. I know that topological sort can use a stack or queue, you need to track indegree, add nodes to the stack/queue when their indegree == 1, and so on.
I also used this to help learn (and really understand) common runtimes which helped me when deriving the runtimes of my own algorithms.
Since I started with premade decks I had to look at lot of things up during my walks, but that slowed down as towards the end of my studying.
I did all this to prep for interview (which I wrote about on my blog: https://sjer.red/blog/2024/job-hunt/) -- I would say it worked fairly well for me though you definitely need to pair it with LeetCode or similar.
That blog post is unbelievable. It looks very/eerily similar to men dating online in the 2020s.
I'm guessing for someone learning a new language is relaxing and therefore helps recharging the person after hours of intense PhD work - things like enjoying daily progress, discovery of foreign culture, the euphoria of being able to read and watch new stuff...
Learning a new language is a stressful grind. I've studied CJK at a similar pace as this article, and it's equal parts exhaustion as it is elation. Not for the feint of heart.
Exactly this.
Unlike the PhD, they make daily progress on the language. Success is visible.
(Edit: ok, the truth is they were not doing this at the same time as the PhD. I still like my comment.)
For what it's worth I've been through periods of this multiple times with different things and it never really feels like discipline is required (aside from on some _really_ busy days), you just want to do it if you're actually interested.
I likely couldn't force myself to learn, say, Spanish, if I tried despite it being technically far easier. It's just not interesting to me in the same way.
I use ChatGPT/Claude in bed...
He wasn't doing a PhD at the time he was learning Mandarin (he's just started his PhD).
I think an increasingly big difference isn't so much drive as it is sort of the inverse, lack of distraction. A lot of people's attention is just permanently dispersed. What's very effective is just cut all low quality or non necessary media or apps out of your life or limit them to say 15 minutes a day.
Then when you have inevitably nothing to do you can either throw in 10 minutes of doing anki flash cards or doing nothing, and that'll lower the bar to learn immensely. If I had to guess one thing that Isaak doesn't do is scroll for hours through newsfeeds or TikTok. With myself and most people I know that's by far the biggest thing to eat time.
Absolutely - I'm vouching for this comment.
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.
I emigrated twice within ten years (move, learn the language, find a job, than find a job, move, learn the language). I sometimes wonder how does it feel not having to run and push all the time just not to fall behind.
The price for the motivation could be higher you're willing to pay.
> Doing a PhD and learning Mandarin as a side project?!
his matriculation year is 2024 (and fall classes haven't even started) so he's doing a PhD like the pre-med kids were "doing" med school freshman year. people that brag like this don't finish - there were a few in my cohort too that washed out after quals.
Author also graduated high school from Austria early, and finished a Berkeley math degree in 2 years. I’d say author is gifted.
That said, technical PhDs often require a combination of raw mental horsepower, persistence and luck. (Working for the right advisor in a promising area)
I brought about the same smarts as my peers but they graduated in 5 years whereas I did 8 years because I didn’t have the most promising area of research plus I got unlucky.
as someone with lots of impressively credentialed braggart friends.. that's not always the case.
although w.r.t. myself? absolutely agree with the sentiment. I would wash out in half a week with that kind of workload.
>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.
Noone goes without sleep for three days and doesnt pay a severe heavy price for it. Stop it with that dumb sleep machismo...
Man, have you ever been 20smth years old? Do you really remember it as the time when you were thinking about "heavy price" beforehand and were suppressing your "machismo"?
The point you’re making is ridiculous though, because what Isaak has done is clearly an unusual accomplishment. You’re actually just making excuses for yourself, being too old to have the motivation. It’s a less helpful explanation than just plain curiosity - and that’s available to all age groups.
Yes, yes, and yes? People use youth to excuse all sorts of unhealthy behavior. Some of my friends smoked cigarettes but most of us didn't because why would we harm ourselves on purpose like that?
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.
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.
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.
An excellent observation, and one that also applies to pretty much any skill with a steep learning curve (but whose applicability in one's daily life is decidedly optional -- like learning to play an instrument reasonably well, for example). If you're only doing it "for the sheer fun of it", or as boredom reduction tool then it almost certainly isn't going to be worth it.
On a more encouraging note -- while your Mandarin has evidently atrophied, it probably isn't completely gone. It's just gone to sleep. Language skills have a way of doing that (even one's native language, if one spends a sufficient amount of time immersed in other environments).
But most likely it's still there, and if you ever took it up again, you'd be surprised at how quickly it comes roaring back.
This is nuts, if i learned Mandarin, i would probably move to Taiwan, where the CoL is almost 1/4th of where I am right now. I know some other languages, but loss the will to study anymore lol.
You might as well move to any Chinese t1/t2 city; the cost of life is even lower, and you'll probably have more opportunities.
You can go without knowing Mandarin, you can learn while you are there at a language school or university.
CoL?
Cost of living
Passing HSK 6 is hard, congrats.
Instead of seeing it as a massive grind, you could integrate it into your life in small ways e.g. conversing with native speakers, reading some of your daily content in Chinese, etc. You'd get the skill back essentially for free, and enjoy it more.
> 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.)
I know a bit of Italian and I found out that if I think hard enough there are cognates! Or, at least, something close to it anyway. I used your example of fingir/fingere and asked ChatGPT. See for yourself:
Me:
Is there a word in English that looks like fingir and is related to "to imagine"?
ChatGPT:
The English word "feign" is related to the Spanish word "fingir." Both words share a common Latin root, fingere, meaning "to shape" or "to form." While "feign" often means pretending or giving a false appearance, it can be connected to "imagine" in the sense of fabricating or creating a scenario in the mind. So, "feign" might be what you're looking for!
Learning reinforces itself once you get fluent enough.
Interesting. I had the impression that Chinese will likely become very useful during our lifetimes... With the momentum their economy has, I expect knowledge of both English and Chinese to become a very sought out skill
There was a soviet era joke: optimists practise their english, pessimists practise their chinese, and realists practise stripping their Kalashnikovs.
Four decades later: I guess some fraction of the optimists have emigrated; the pessimists might be finding their language skills freshly in demand; and the realists teach their grandchildren: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE3UUbBKDS8
> There was a soviet era joke: optimists practise their english, pessimists practise their chinese, and realists practise stripping their Kalashnikovs.
Hah, that joke is more widespread than I realised. The Czech version is that optimists learn English, pessimists learn Russian, and realists learn marksmanship.
The "joke" really fits current Russia.
- hundreds of thousands run away after the Ukraine invasion to not get drafted (learning English was probably very useful for that, lingua franca of business and generally of the world)
-China is looking to make Russia their puppet state / due to embargo Russians cannot buy stuff from the West, so they try to get stuff via China (on a side note, they also get embargoed there to some degree + this comes at a cost)
-the poor are conscripted to die charging with their Kalashnikov against artillery. What's the expected life of them? 1 day?
Except that lots of Chinese already speak English, and their Chinese is better, so I don't ever see a large market for mandarin skills in non-native speakers on the same scale as English.
There are very few Chinese speaking English, actually. Go there and you’ll see.
There's lots of you include the diaspora. Way more so than non-native mandarin speakers.
But the idea of chinese becoming useful in our lifetimes has more to do with chinese speakers in PRC and not in the diaspora.
That was what was told to kids in elementary school 10-15 years ago, yes.
We seem to be moving away from that future (or perhaps it was never really true to begin with).
When I was very young in the 70's, I was told to study French because it was the international language.
In the 80's, it was Japanese because they were going to take over the world.
In the 90's, I was told to take Spanish in college because the US was going to be a bilingual country.
As an adult in the 2000's, I watch US helicopter parents scramble to put their kids into immersive Mandarin courses, mimicking the Japanese fad of the 80's.
I'm at least proficient in four languages, none of which are the above four, and my life and career has been just dandy.
tarrifs and other measures within the US and EU seem to be going the opposite direction.
It’s very hard to see how those local barriers to entry would reverse the global trend (I might even use a stronger word, closer to juggernaut.)
TBH, automated translation is the only potential I see to reduce the massive need for Chinese language skills in the future. Already we (in the US) get (and choose to use!!) parts whose data sheets are only available in Chinese. It seems clear to me where we are going.
That's what people in the Soviet Union thought 50 years ago too, about the USA.
> Knowing Chinese is about as useful as juggling and you might as well get really good at juggling if you're bored.
If your purpose is to show off, yes, juggling wins.
I guess the chinese content is disappointing because lack of freedom of speech. but why don't you travel to china ? to have real conversations with real people
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.
> I don't think I can do SRS
No need. :-) Comprehensible Input and immersive language usage can be your superpower.
I've recently discovered this approach, and I really like it.
I've looked at ways to make it more interactive / gamified, and I've made a prototype with with simple interactive stories (text adventures), designed for language learners (https://lingostories.org - 100% free).
I'm still trying to figure out what the next steps should be to make it more useful, but some people already enjoy it.
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.
Slight aside, but I learned to read with Asterix & Obelix & Tintin. The Asterix series in particular was fantastic for reading the same story in difficulty languages, and savoring the wordplay in each, and how the translators played with things. Having visual context to go with the words themselves was such a boon, I really am surprised the approach isn't given more legitimate respect.
Yes. That's how I learned my native language and that's how I learned other languages. Super effective, and super fun. No rote memory whatsoever. BTW, Chinese didn't have a tradition of producing comic books, but they were big on turning classics into so-called 小人书，a perfect source for learning authentic, highly contextual, yet simple Chinese. Here is an example: http://www.laohuabao.com/xiaorenshu/gudian/9/113957717.html
Comic books are especially helpful for conversation because they are often written in that sort of "what one would really say" style, which is extrememy helpful for speaking more native. When I was learning Finnish I found a set of translated Garfield books that were really helpful.
> I don't think I can do SRS. My dopamine system...
I'm willing to bet you've never had probes analyzing anything about your dopamine system and how it responds to any of the activities you go on to describe. More likely, you've started using trendy pseudo-scientific jargon to justify why you believe yourself to be physiologically limited.
Do you struggle to see through or enjoy to some of those activities? So be it.
But chalking that up to some scientific sounding stuff you pieced together over the years just hardens those limitations. It's a very bad habit that's become really common lately. I strongly recommend trying to break it. It'll open up some doors that you're currently keeping shut.
I feel similar to how the parent commenter feels, but describe it using different words. Therapists and psychiatrists will use similar language, dopamine, motivation, and executive function.
How do you recommend one does this? > I strongly recommend trying to break it
I currently try to hack my main activities to prevent myself from being too lazy to do them. Would be happy to hear your suggestions!
Controversial take but I think the state of therapy/psychiatry has become a bit of a joke over the past handful of years where people have normalized the idea that everyone needs to be speaking to a therapist. With the fact you can shop around for a therapist, and the fact that most people like being told their problems are others' faults, you have an industry that from my view has mostly just taught everyone to externalize blame and pay someone to validate that for them.
Everyone wants to get a diagnosis of ADHD and/or autism so they can spend the rest of their life never growing or improving and living under the pretense that they don't have the ability to do certain things because a professional told them their brain is inherently limited. When in reality these diagnoses are just categorizations of behaviours, not some kind of scientific barrier baked into the coding of the universe.
I think people would be better off not dwelling so much on the "facts" they think they know about their own brains. It's inherently limiting to assume everything your capable of can only come as a result of the function you think your brain operates on.
This is not true.
Honestly, diagnosing for ADHD accelerate the improvement.
It is impossible to fight if you don't know what you're fighting. It enables you to prevent repeated patterns, not chasing your tail in an endless struggle.
You are so right. People imagine everyone going to therapy to cope, but really it's being able to recognize triggers and adapt.
Everyone already does it in some ways - for example, you know you make mistakes when tired tired - you recognize you are tired this moment and decided to reschedule the important activity.
Therapy gives same tool - you recognize you are having an episode and take steps to avoid typical negative outcomes.
I spent many years as a basically spoiled over-paid developer, sitting around with effectively unlimited resources for distraction and definitely, it took some conditioning to recover from it.
It's really not something I can easily recommend, but completing 75hard had quite a significant impact on my approach to a lot of things, and I'm extremely fortunately to have done it. I also practice zazen quite intensively but I'm not sure that's quite as directly useful as 75hard for most people.
Yes, the guy behind it is a lunatic, and the subreddit is a bit of a cult, but something happens to you around day 40 and it sort of 'snapped' me out of it.
You've got this!
For anyone else wondering:
For the typical HN person who might valorize evidence-based living, the starting point is probably learning to:
1. Recognize where you've adopted a belief from little direct evidence,
2. Pay attention to what impact these (inevitably) many beliefs have on your life
3. Stop reinforcing and repeating those that are only there as invisible walls to justify negative or limiting self-image
Even between "dopamine" and "motivation", one belief blames an imagined phyiology that might only be remedied through some therapeutic medicine/practice that may not even exist; the other blames a weak will that you might find some satisfaction (or pleasure) in challenging now and then.
Are either strongly evidenced in one's individual case? No, but if you have to believe one of them, it may as well be the one that lets you wake up some morning and see if you might accomplish something surprising.
s/dopamine/motivation/g
Have you ever actually tried to learn a language? I'm learning Korean as a native English speaker. I thought it would be a grind, which it kind of is, but learning new words and grammar is actually really fun. I use anki cards and get a dopamine hit whenever I remember the word correctly.
I think my language learning problem is motivation.
Reading this post, that is alot of work, for something that doesn't have clear pay off.
I think it would be cool to be able to speak Spanish and Mandarin(and others) But there isn't that much practicalness for me it especially when everyone speaks English.
Yeah, I think OP drank the kool-aid on neurotransmitters.
You're quite literally describing textbook ADHD symptoms. If you haven't already, you may want to get assessed.
I'm someone who was perfectly able to use anki and learn chinese to a decent level with fairly intense combined-type untreated (at the time) ADHD. What you need is a compelling reason to learn (for me, it was the fear of letting down my wife by not being able to talk to her family).
The ability to focus on some things but not others is perfectly consistent with ADHD.
Disordered attention is the whole deal.
You might find it easy but that doesn't mean others will.
> The ability to focus on some things but not others is perfectly consistent with ADHD.
This is an insanely broad definition that literally the entire population would fall under.
> You might find it easy but that doesn't mean others will.
No one finds concentrating on any and every subject easy. Assuming this is due to ADHD, and not something in their control, is a cop out.
Ignore them. There's a belief system that sees a lack of success in anything that one wants to do as illness or witchcraft. For them, a person doesn't lack motivation to practice something because that thing is difficult and exhausting and one can't always see a sufficient reward (or chance of gaining that reward in a reasonable amount of time) in the end. For them, it's always going to be an illness or a curse that is stealing away your ability to achieve your true desires.
They might be recommending pharma here, but it would be prayer on another forum, or more protein intake on a third.
Perhaps the solution is to not be on forums.
> Another came with sad eyes and said to him: "I don't know what my sickness is."
"I know," Baudolino said. "You are slothful."
"How can I be cured?"
"Sloth appears the first time when you notice the slowness of the movement of the sun."
"And then—?"
"Never look at the sun."I have severe ADHD and do spaced repetition just fine, even when I'm not on my meds. The only reason I've paused my Japanese learning is sleep issues and stress from trying to find a tech job. What GP is describing sounds like the sort of resistance to tedium that can happen to anybody, not just to those with ADHD.
The issue with software like Anki is that it can feel like a complete chore or like a fun game depending on how you use it and the quality of premade cards available. Only using SRS, doing it for 1hr+ straight with no breaks, and DIYing all the cards is how a lot of people use Anki, which is insane to me.
He is also describing perfectly normal average person.
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.
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. :)
I am white, but have very long hair and a beard.
It was the touristy parts of Beijing where I got the most attention. Usually from tourists from more rural parts of China, or museums with lots of bussed in schoolkids.
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).
I (white, blonde and green-eyed at the time) spent a lot of my childhood in SE Asia and southern China in the late 70s/early 80s.
Once we got to the smaller, interior towns, we had to be really careful with our movement, as we could attract dangerously large crowds just by going to the morning market or the like. The vast majority of people were just curious, and I have a lot of happy memories of smiles and connections, but a few of coming close to getting killed, too.
Still, risk is everywhere, and the positives win out. I loved learning what I could, and I hope meeting us was a net joy for the folks we interacted with, too.
You were going to get killed for being white in the wrong place?
Probably less to do with being white specifically than simply being a convenient Other, but yes. Most people are great. Some are awful, a few evil. When you stand out, you'll attract the attention of everyone, including the latter, and you'd be wise not to forget that, in all its aspects. The whole reason we were able to survive is that locals looked after us, too, and that's worth emphasizing.
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.
> You need to leave Beijing and especially Shanghai and head farther inland to regain your celebrity status!
Just going to the suburbs of Shanghai will do it.
> I had the same "local celebrity" experience when visiting Beijing.
My own dimly-remembered anecdote involves passing through mainland China back in the 90s in tow of my parents, as an elementary-schooler with very blond hair. (Two qualities that are no longer true.)
Even in the downtown areas of Beijing it drew attention, but if you went further out to more-rural zones... Well, imagine small crowds coming up to gawk and indicating they'd like to touch your hair to confirm it's real and/or for good luck.
It wasn't just a lack of in-person visitors, but also that the standard of living there 30 years ago there was a much lower, and even the locally-affluent were unlikely to get much media from outside the country.
So ~20 years ago I went to Kuala Lumpur. For those not knowing where or what that is, it's the capital city of Malaysia with a population of ~1.8 million people. It once held the title for the world's tallent building (ie the Petronas Towers). So this is a modern city not that far from Singapore.
I happened to catch a train to one of the shopping centers while I was there so this was the mass transit system in a relatively modern city. This boy of 7 or so kept gawking at me. He was with his father. I looked up at him, curious, and his father said in passable English that his son has never seen a white person before.
That was quite a surreal experience for me, particularly given the environment.
I can't imagine what it must be like in rural China with few Western visitors.
> his son has never seen a white person before
I drove a 4x4 right around Africa from mid 2016 to mid 2019.
It was quite common in West Africa to drive into a village where the kids would run away terrified and the adults would explain the kids had never seen a white person before, and they thought I was a ghost.
I drove across an international border where the border guard had been working for 3 years and had never seen a foreigner.
It's fun getting off the map.
I am a polyglot but I have slight hearing impairment, which means that unless someone is directly talking to me, I won't understand anything. Sucks.
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) 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 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/
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 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!
Your app is good, I'm between HSK1-HSK2 and there are often scenarios I want to practice that aren't covered in the standard dialog options in other popular Mandarin apps, so I see the appeal.
Some feedback: - It took a while to generate my first session, I almost lost interest before I even knew what the app was.
- I tried to click on the buttons in the splash screen screenshot, mistaking it for the app itself.
- I would have liked to not to have to enter the prompt myself the first time, and just click something pre-made, only because the first time I use an app I have very little patience and just want to see what it actually does, so if it makes me think (or wait a long time) I may churn.
Maybe if you had a default prompt's audio baked into the APK it would feel more snappy (for those who select the default prompt.)
Anyhow nice work
I also use Netflix to great effect for practicing Chinese, especially when paired with the Language Reactor[1] extension in Chrome.
* Note: Netflix has much more Taiwanese content than mainland China content, so do note the difference in the accent / dialect you'll be learning.
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/language-reactor/ho...
How do you pass the initial language barriers? I'm trying to learn Spanish with Netflix shows and the Language Reactor, but I find it extremely hard to understand spoke Spanish. The characters speak so fast that I couldn't discern individual words or phrases. For a lot of times, they speak as if they are murmuring. When I was learning English, my ability to understand spoken English grew with my ability to read, but in the case of Spanish, I can read a lot more advanced text than being able to listen...
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.
DuChinese does have an integration with HackChinese, which is basically a Mandarin only paid version of Anki with a sleek interface. I use it for convenience because I find managing Anki decks too tedious.
Yeah DuChinese is I think the premier Chinese graded reader app right now. We also have the tap-to-lookup and make-flashcard-from-content flows (unfortunately only in our system for now, haven't build flashcard import/export yet). The thing we have that they don't is the ability to generate content about whatever subject you want (which can help make it much more personally interesting)
Also while naming quality resources I should also mention [Pleco](https://www.pleco.com/) - it's _definitely_ the best Chinese dictionary app - highly recommended.
I was hoping to find something like your app. Haven't tried it yet but so excited!
Peppa Pig is hard :-)
What would a be a good child animation for learning a foreign language? I'm trying to learn a little of French for a coming trip.
Totally depends on what you can get access to in the target language. For French - maybe Trotro? https://www.youtube.com/@TrotroOfficiel/videos
If you need French Subs + dictionary (and maybe also English subs) you can try using the [languagereactor](https://www.languagereactor.com/) chrome plugin and find a source that has both subtitles (i.e. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIZ2gLCkv5Y)
1. Check Wikipedia for the major TV networks in the country. E.g. Sweden is SVT
2. Check if the network has a mobile app
3. Use a VPN to connect to that country and open the app
4. Look for shows you want to try.
I also find it hard in Spanish, even though it's a kid show.
Thank you so much for sharing!
Your project is very interesting. Thanks a lot!
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-beginni...
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.
The importance of SRS is often overstated.
To my knowledge, there isn’t a single study showing SRS as effective for language learning where it was an experimental variable.
There’s anecdotal evidence thrown about, which gives us some indication that it’s helpful. But I have doubts that it’s a good return on investment.
To avoid diving deep into long arguments about this or that, I’ll keep my advice short: If you use an SRS, make sure that the item your test goes through the brain structures you want to get good at, eventually reading can help with listening, but because you’re not processing the language through the typical brain structures that handle it, you’re delaying getting good until you’ve exercised these “muscles”.
Also, don’t learn words in isolation. Better is to learn the words in context. Better yet is to vary the practice, maybe hookup an LLM to vary the cloze word, if that’s your cup of tea.
Use audio if possible. If you’re comfortable with the language, use a TTS.
These criticisms are all of text-only flashcards, not of spaced repetition itself. It is a common mistake to conflate the two, but it's perfectly easy to have videos, images, and audio on your flashcards in Anki.
Spaced repetition is a fundamental learning method that is attuned to how the brain works. It's not really tied to a specific method like flashcards. Rather, flashcards are merely the most logical and easy implementation of spaced repetition.
I use Anki but oh did I have to learn to discipline myself. Anki’s extreme flexibility coupled with an engineer’s mind had me spending whole stretches of days or even weeks just tweaking my card templates, hoping to achieve some sort of optimal card format that will maximize my acquisition of the language (Mandarin like in the post). At some point I had enough scripts in there that I had turned it into my own Duolingo-like app.
These days I reign that impulse in and force myself to stick to simple card formats. Creating cards should take as little time as possible. The Chinese Support add-on is super useful for that by the way.
Another thing about Anki is that it can feel oppressive sometimes, because if you don’t do your reps they just pile up and it becomes a drag to clear the “debt.” Staying on top of my reps before I had a baby and life was chill was easy; now with the baby I sometimes feel like Anki takes away from the already limited time I have to expose myself to the language by reading books, watching videos, etc.
I stick to it though, since for a language that distant from the two other languages I speak, memorization work is a must.
> Another thing about Anki is that it can feel oppressive sometimes, because if you don’t do your reps they just pile up and it becomes a drag to clear the “debt.” Staying on top of my reps before I had a baby and life was chill was easy; now with the baby I sometimes feel like Anki takes away from the already limited time I have to expose myself to the language by reading books, watching videos, etc.
For me the new habit has been to not guilt myself too badly for skipping my cards if I know I spent an hour or two on native materials. Key to this has been to make sure that while all of my subdecks under my combined deck offer me a set number of new cards every day, the combined deck is set to zero new cards per day. If I'm missing days, I need to stop adding cards for a while until my daily load is tolerable enough that I'm not tempted to skip out.
Also, I like to get new cards of the same type at the same time. After I've cleared them once, let them be mixed in with the other cards, but when they're introduced, I should be focused.
I hope that FSRS* eventually solves this: they've pretty much done away with manually-chosen "ease" as a concept (although not everyone has accepted that yet.) I hope they'll ditch the idea of people regulating the number of new cards they get per day and move to allowing users to select an amount of time they want to spend, or a date by which they want to have a particular proficiency (defined by card recall), and instead have the algo choose how many new cards you should have. e.g. I'm looking for 45 minutes a day of review, optimize for that; or, I want to be able on the 15th of October to be able to get 95% of this set of cards correct, drill me on them repetitiously for as long as it takes.
There's been a lot of thoughtful discussion about pushing the app forward in ways like this.** Simpler is better, and the scheduler should be scheduling, not the user; the scheduler's job is to adapt to the user.
The next frontier for SRS after polishing the schedulers is to gain an understanding of what makes a good card or a good deck, rather than leaving it as an exercise to the reader along with a bit of handwaving about how it's better to learn from one's own cards than ones that others have made. I'm about 3 years into daily SRS and this is not my experience. I'm eternally grateful to people who come up with innovative decks or just well written and focused cards.
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[*] https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki/wiki/
[**] https://forums.ankiweb.net/t/pass-fail-grading-as-default/ https://forums.ankiweb.net/t/how-to-prevent-users-from-misus...
(sorata seems to be a contributor to AnkiDroid, and Expertium the lead of FSRS. It's really nice to watch this be worked out in public.)
>SRS
Spaced repetition system (or maybe software?) for people like me who were not familiar with this acronym.
> The importance of an SRS system like Anki cannot be overstated.
I'm not sure if I agree with that, as no native speakers need to have an SRS to learn their native languages. No doubt that SRS will allow us to remember words, yet few can really acquire those words intuitively. When starting to learn English in school, we used some kind of SRS system to memorize words and phrases and sentences, and man, the result was abysmal. We spent 10 years learning English (3 years of middle school, 3 years of high school, and 4 years of college), trying to memorize new words every day, passing TOEFL and later GRE through intense SRS, yet few students could understand TV shows, read fictions, or communicate with English speakers. And the learning was arduous, to say the least.
In contrast, I was lucky enough that my mom gave me a set of graded readers compiled by National Geographic, and simply asked me to read them through. And then Sidney Sheldon's books, Friends, etc and etc. So basically I immersed myself into the language, never having to do SRS, and I could easily pass TOEFL and the GRE Verbal years before graduating college. As a bonus, I started to enjoy TV shows and movies early on, and was able to socialize with my classmates and professors without even trying. I also used the method to learn Spanish and Japanese, and the results are similar. No SRS needed but consistent exposure to the languages. In less than two years, I can read books like The Alchemist, If Tomorrow Comes, and Project Hail Mary. Another interesting contrast is that I couldn't understand much conversation in those languages, precisely because I spent most of my spare time in reading.
Native speakers certainly use spaced repetition, as they hear the same sounds over and over again until they learn them. All an SRS is, is a piece of software that optimizes this process.
I actually think the 6 days a week of tutoring is the thing that needs to be emphasised more. That's the thing that really makes it all come together.
Particularly if you have extremely fast lookup methods like rikachan or language reactor, you can basically just recoup the time on spamming input and re-doing the lookups until they stick, while it being more fun and lower stress.
A grammar deck up to intermediate level grammar is worth smashing out as fast as humanly possible though.
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.
Sorry maybe this is the wrong question. But with regard to ANKI (all caps) are referring to some app?
> The importance of an SRS system like Anki cannot be overstated.
This is definitely an overstatement. It is a useful tool for the specific purpose of blindly memorizing associations. This is a hurdle people frequently run into when deciding to learn a language, but it's a pretty tight problem to be having and SRS is not like, critical.
> It is a useful tool for the specific purpose of blindly memorizing associations.
Then you're not using Anki correctly.
Look, all I can say to that is that the name isn't a coincidence.
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.
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 :)
I had ChatGPT fail on basic Spanish sentences, to the point where I with week of Spanish could tell it's wrong (as it, basic grammar was mangled).
I can't recommend it for language learning at all, I'm afraid. :(
Wait...how do you do this in Anki? The randomization part.
Anki supports HTML and JavaScript so technically anything is possible.
Importance of SRS system definitely can be overstated. You can learn language without them and depending on your personality, they oftentimes turn into demotivating tiring drag that wastes your effort. If you like it, it is perfectly fine to use it, but if you don't, there is really no reason to force it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Hitchhiking is by far one of the best ways to learn a new language.
Another way is moving to another country. You'll learn quicker than you think, and no need to learn the language beforehand, it'll be great fun to try to understand something completely foreign, and gets a lot easier when you see people's faces and hands :)
If you're young, you still have time to move to another country, and move back home if you get bored/scared. It's not as difficult or dangerous as most people think.
I've done it this way and didn't learn much, I learned more by self-studying after I left. Thinking that I would just learn my target language just by being there was my biggest mistake.
Sure, if your target language isn't too far from your native one, learning it on the go probably works fine. But you aren't going to get from English to Chinese casually by picking up stuff though, you'll end up knowing a hundred words tops for your daily life and that's it.
Yeah that's why I think you need a small, but solid base to really take advantage of being there.
Indeed that's also my opinion, sure if you spend 6 months before going there and reach a lower B1, that's not the same story.
Yes agree. I lived in Colombia for 4 years. But hitchhiking is learning on overdrive. Not just language, but what they like to call "agency".
I slightly disagree that you don't need to learn the language beforehand. You don't NEED to, but I would actually recommend getting a 4 week crash course beforehand.
Because I've seen so many expats that don't even know where to start so they just hang out with other expats and that's how you end up living in a foreign country for 10 years and you can't speak the language.
The most minimal thing is you need to learn how to point at a thing and say "How do you say?" and refuse to revert to your native language.
You can read some stories about that trip here: https://medium.com/p/d4c0358c3097
I wish I came up with a better title.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
You should try any of the SOTA LLMs (4o, Claude, Gemini) for translation rather than Google/Microsoft Translate. They are much better.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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).
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.
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-han...
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.
Updated! Guess I traded a bit of my fluency in English for Chinese. :p
I worked through “Remembering Simplified Hanzi” and my one complaint is that I wish that it were “grouped by frequency” a bit more.
The way that these books work is that the first one is the most common ~1500 characters grouped by radical / component, and then the second one is the next most common ~1500 characters grouped the same way.
The problem is that this means that you have to learn 1500 characters before you know all of the most common 1500. I stopped after 1000 characters and was left not knowing many extremely common characters that hadn’t been introduced yet.
I think that a better organization would have been 500, 1000, 1500 instead of 1500, 1500.
Other than that, great books that I also recommend.
Tuttle "Learning Chinese Characters" by Matthews and Matthews is organized in the way you mention. I find it highly recommendable, although I can't compare to Heisig's book because I don't have that one.
It only has 800 characters, though. But they are the most common.
> The power of SRS (spaced repetition system) cannot be overstated
Speaking as someone who has used Anki the last 5 years, has built and sold Anki decks and is working on implementing various spaced repetition schedulers as we speak... unfortunately its importance can absolutely be overstated.
Definitely more language learners should be using an SRS, but there are lots of people who take it way too far (I have way too many stories).
Where things go wrong for most people is their understanding of the role of the SRS. The SRS to language learning is what protein shakes are to bodybuilding. But while no serious body builder would try to get ripped by drinking protein shakes and neglecting working out, there are unfortunately tons of language learners doing basically just that with the SRS. To acquire a language you need input! The SRS is just (very) helpful supplement.
> there are lots of people who take it way too far
I wrote in another comment that that’s exactly my issue. I can easily spend hours, days, weeks even just tweaking my card templates due to Anki’s extreme customizability. That stems from a (false!) belief that I can somehow find just the right card format that will impress the language in my head in no time. Took me a long time to reign in the impulse to endlessly tweak templates. I remember having days when I felt extremely frustrated after realizing I had spent pretty much my entire study time working on Anki and not exposing myself to the language.
Believe it or not, after 5 years of Anki, I still have 0 styling on my personal decks. Not even dark mode. Just black text on a white background haha
yeah that's a trap I think a lot of people with an engineering mindset fall in to. Reminds me of the people who spend endless hours tweaking their note taking applications.
Sure - I don't think the article (or myself) are making the case that SRS is all you need - after all - its just flashcards on steroids, and nobody would make the case that flashcards are enough to become fluent in a language.
That's the same type of person who assumes you can become fluent purely through Duolingo.
"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
For instance here's a PhD thesis of someone who learned French to fluency with only watching TV and (later) reading books:
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.
> For an alternative take, there is at least some evidence that SRS is entirely unnecessary and can even hinder language learning.
I do not believe that the above is an alternative take. Most people who do SRS pair it with tons of comprehensible input. Also, a lot of takedowns on SRS tend to actually be takedowns on memorizing 1:1 translations of words at all which is all they assume people do with SRS. I've never done those, because I think word lists are bad and 1:1 translations from L1->L2 are bad because they are always wrong (languages are different, not substitution ciphers.) I almost only deal in complete sentences in SRS, and clozes.
There's also a piece of advice given by David Parlett in an old book about learning languages straight from possibly incomplete printed grammars and native or anthropological recordings: "learn the hard stuff first." There are some things about languages that are central, complex, and should just be learned by rote. Romance conjugations are some of those things. Using SRS to learn how to conjugate reflexively and automatically in Spanish (after probably 50K card reviews) was the best thing I could have done to open up a world of comprehensible input.
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.
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.
> 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.
> integrated LLMs for their language learning process
Fwiw, TFA's methods page[1] has a GPT section.
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.
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.
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.
It has always been my go to, but my wife is more in your camp.
Personally I don't see the point in any of the study if you aren't going to actually use the language. I couldn't get motivated to do any of the study if I weren't primarily studying through native media. All I would have is an empty grind.
I feel quite lucky to be in the camp that vibes with this method. I find the joy comes from focusing on all the things I can understand no matter how little. You really tangibly feel the progress as you make it too. You have to pay attention to be scanning for things that seem learnable to you as well, so the attention is pretty locked on.
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.
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.
I too find it wild when people do it at a beginner stage.
Back when I was learning English during my school years, I only started seriously watching native content after I already had either a B1 or B2 certificate. At that point I already knew most of what was being said, I just wasn’t used to hearing/parsing it in real-time and without the “padding” that comes with learner-oriented content. So the gap I had to bridge there was small.
The burden of learning basically everything at the same time - word meanings, grammar patterns, native-level speech patterns and speed - sounds daunting to me. But I think if you are at a life stage where you can put tons of time into it, it works.
Use subtitles and the extension Language Reactor. You can translate any sentence or word on the fly.
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!
Yeah this is a huge problem. AFAICT the "solution" currently is basically to just grind to the point you can understand Peppa Pig or the rough equivalent at ~40%-50% comprehension, and then sentence mine each episode painstakingly using something like Migaku + Anki flashcards until you can watch a brand new Peppa episode at ~80% comprehension. Its painful but after this you really "unlock" content and its a lot smoother and more interesting after that (the stone finally starts rolling _downhill")
I'm making an app to try to help with low level comprehensible input, posted elsewhere in this thread
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-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.
I agree with peer comment. The actor was not learning the language but the pronunciation.
In opera, singers usually sing in different languages that they don’t speak (Italian, German, French) so they learn how to pronounce.
I grew up multilingual (3 languages at home, 3 at school) so I already have a repository of phonemes in several language families that I can draw from. I can learn to to say common phrases and sound near native in a number of languages in a month. I can also mimic accents. I noticed that someone like Trevor Noah has the same ability because they grew up multilingual.
But sounding native doesn’t mean learning the language.
Japanese also has relatively simple phonology. Just have to pay attention to pitch accent. Try sounding native in a tonal language in a month.
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.
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.
Side note: I don't generally put much weight on the FSI numbers. Sure they provide a useful ranking of how long it takes to learn various languages (e.g., Spanish < Polish < Arabic), but I'd recommend ignoring their actual time estimates.
Most people don't learn languages at the FSI so to expect it will take you as long is not accurate. It may take you way longer, or maybe you'll be way faster depending on how good you are at learning languages and how much time you're putting in each day.
But yeah, to summarize, the FSI rankings are good, but I don't agree with the actual estimates.
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.
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.
Reminds me of the film Incubus in which Shatner learned just enough esperanto to deliver his lines.
It might be helpful to someone, so I’m suggesting something similar for Spanish: * https://www.dreamingspanish.com
Anything similar for Japanese?
Yes! You should checkout 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)
Take a look at https://refold.link/Japanese_resources
I can vouch. I followed the Refold method to learn French and am also following it for Japanese.
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).
offtopic, I really hope Duolingo adopt some aspect of Anki.
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 yearsThis 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.
Plug for this tool I’ve been using for SRS:
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.
Do they have anything in common with Mandarin Blueprint? It seems to use very similar mnemonics. How far did the tool get you?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Thanks this is awesome. My wife is chinese and I’m going to try and copy some of your methods.
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.
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.
It's the second time now I see someone saying Chinese grammar is heavily influenced by modern English. I've never heard of that, where comes that from?
I definitely wouldn't say Chinese is a really easy language to learn. The absence of word conjugation is a godsense after learning French, but the tones and characters stay hard for me.
I've always been pretty bad in French but I can open a book in French and read a sentence aloud without too much trouble. I frequently think and dream in Chinese but that task is still daunting to me.
I don't have references at hand, but I can recall some of the discussions I used to read. The "Europeanization", or 欧化，came in many different flavors (even though most of the influence came from English), for better or for worse. There was a "new culture movement" more than 100 years, and the Chinese elites tried to translate western works into Chinese that ordinary people could understand, and that movement fundamentally changed modern Chinese.
- polysyllabic words (复音词）。Modern Chinese has many such coined words that either came from Japanese or from European languages. For instance, 台灯 == table lamp. Traditional Chinese wouldn't create words like that.
- Introduction of linking verb. Traditional Chinese, even 白话文，don't use linking verbs like "be", "get", and etc. For instance, in English one may say "his dream is to be a scientist", but in Chinese one would only say "他梦想成为科学家“， while it is now perfectly find to say "他的梦想是成为一名科学家“，due to the influence of English.
- Introduction of long sentences. Traditional Chinese does not use long sentences, let alone clauses. For instance, in the modern Chinese, people are used to "if .. then" type of sentences, yet it was not used in traditional Chinese.
- Punctuations. Traditional Chinese uses only period, if it uses punctuation at all. Yet now modern Chinese uses all kinds of English punctuations.
- New syntactical structures, even though they are eye sores to me. For instance, in English one can say "they made great contribution to the society", and in modern Chinese one can say "他们对社会做出的贡献很大“, even though a more traditional way is "他们对社会贡献很大“。BTW，even the latter is westernized, as in traditional Chinese we don't use propositions like "对“。
- New grammar. For instance, traditional Chinese does not have passive speech, but modern Chinese does.
- The modernization of Chinese syntax and semantics. Check this book: https://www.amazon.com/%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD%E7%8E%B0%E4%BB%A3%.... The entire framework of studying Chinese comes from the English/European world.
Yes, learning all the characters has a steep
learning curve, but once one passes that stage, ...
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.
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.
In my experience- yes. As you mentioned, there is a steep learning curve before you get to that point. Characters instead of letters, sounds you're unaccustomed to hearing and making, and multiple tones make learning basic phrases much more work than many languages. However, once you get some time with those difficult pieces, the grammar is actually much easier than one would expect. I would much rather learn another language like Chinese than a conjugation-heavy one such as Finnish.
Chinese grammar only really seems like English in the beginning. It diverges fairly aggressively from intermediate onwards.
Reading and listening to Mandarin was much less difficult than I expected. Good pronunciation was more challenging, but after working with a speech-language pathologist, my speech production is good enough that I'm rarely asked to repeat myself.
Is it similar to English? The one thing I remember is there's no tenses or gender.
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.
Any equivalent resources for spanish?
Best anki testimonial that I've read.
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
"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?
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.
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.
Xiomanyc enters the chat.
Nice