Hi,
I’ve tried duolingo for about 2 months straight and all I know how to say is rice, american, italian, english, water and some other useless stuff, it doesn’t even teach you to write or anything like that. It sucks.
I know the best way to learn a language is to go to a teacher or something, but I prefer not to do that and learn it online.
It will probably be harder for me since my native language is not english and I doubt there’s lessons or something online for mandarin in my native language, but I’m willing to try, I know english pretty well.
Use the comprehensible input method.
https://www.vidioma.com/ and https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Chinese have a ton of videos, all grouped by difficulty, pulling from many different mandarin teachers on youtube using this method.
Will have to try this. The hardest part for me will probably be forming the habit to sit there and actively listen. Tried a couple listed as Super Beginner though while the impetus is fresh. Ended up being a nice demonstration that I have retained some Mandarin from my other attempts to learn it because there were things I recognized and went “oh yeah”.
For me, I’ve found the only way to be consistent, is to limit my number of minutes per day. I used to try to do 30m-1h per day, but found that wasn’t sustainable, so now I only do 10m of mandarin and 10m of spanish every day, tracking them with a habit-streak app to stay honest.
If you find you can only do 5m per day, that’s still better than nothing.
Makes sense, thanks. Better a little something than nothing at all, yeah. That’s the mindset I’ve tried to follow when using apps in the past, more or less.
Good morning. Huge wall of text incoming, so please feel free to take it slow or ask for clarification.
First of all, you should forget about making translation the cornerstone of your Mandarin practice. Focus on understanding and being able to produce Mandarin from Mandarin. Translation is basically a huge waste of time. You can leave it to the machines as a way to check your understanding.
I personally think the most essential app for studying Mandarin is Pleco. Not only is it the best dictionary app to such an extent that other apps are forced to integrate it, you can also get a reader that will let you click on the words you don’t know and get a definition instantly. You can go to the entry of the word, view the breakdown into characters, and look at the entries in the Outlier dictionary to understand the etymology of characters better. Focus on encoding the memories during your journeys through the dictionary. You can also use phrases from example sentences from the guifan cidian in your Anki deck. I can’t recommend highly enough getting the basic bundle on Pleco and the Outlier Essentials dictionary. It’s more expensive than a month of some of the subscription apps but it’s considered a core item and it’s a one-time cost, so you don’t need to pay over and over.
Of course you should also be using Anki. The SRS integrated into Pleco uses an algorithm with many undesirable properties, but the FSRS integrated into Anki does a pretty good job of showing you cards only when it’s absolutely necessary, which makes the time spent on Anki more effective. How you use Anki is important. First of all, you should go into the deck settings once a month and click “optimize all presets.” What does it do? Who knows, don’t worry about it. It is not even that important. Second of all, what is Anki even for? Many people will say it is to “learn new words” or “prevent forgetting” but this is actually not true. How you should be thinking of memory in the first place is as a “quality that things I can remember have more or less of on a spectrum.” What Anki is, therefore, is a “device that I can use to give the things I can remember more of the quality of memory.” So, Anki is not useful for “things I can remember that I barely know or don’t know at all,” because it is not very good at increasing the memory of things that cannot be remembered. It is also not useful for “things I can remember quite well,” because the amount you can remember such things more is barely any. Therefore, Anki should only be used for “things I can kind of remember.” This is actually the most important thing to understand about Anki and will save you a lot of grief.
There are some corollaries to this. It follows from this that you should avoid making Anki cards for things you don’t have good memory of in the first place. However, you can’t always do this, so you may end up wasting time on cards you don’t remember well. Anki has a built in tool to help you cull things you can’t remember well, which is called the “leech threshold,” but it’s set high enough that it’s not that useful. What you actually want to do is set the leech threshold as low as you can stand. I recommend 2 or 3. This means that if you get a flashcard wrong 2 or 3 times, it will be suspended. At that point, you won’t see the card anymore. This may be emotionally difficult or make you feel stupid at first. I can only suggest getting over it, as suspending a card doesn’t mean that you no longer have the chance to learn that word. We’ll come back to this soon.
The second corollary is that it is definitely a horrible idea to do all of your language learning solely in Anki. It is a tool that’s limited to increasing memory of things you already kind of know. It cannot effectively move things you don’t know to that state or help you actually have a conversation in the target language. This is why I say it’s essential to incorporate Anki, but you should actually limit the time you use it per day. You should spend no more than about a half hour per day on Anki, and if there are still cards you didn’t get to after 30 minutes, you should simply leave them undone. There’s another deck configuration change that’s related to this, but it requires some further explanation.
The third corollary is that we should look for ways to move things from the category of “I don’t know this at all” to “I kind of know this.” Techniques that let us do this are what allow us to broaden what we can learn with Anki. There’s one technique of this type you shouldn’t use, which is including a language other than the target language on your Anki cards. That’s because suppressing the part of your brain that processes other languages helps you use the target language more effectively. There are broadly two categories of techniques you can use to do this.
Category 1 is “learning stuff.” That is, if you don’t know something at all, you should try to learn it better to the point that you can put it in your Anki. Think about this in terms of constructing a schema and building an interconnected network of knowledge. You can do things like think about how a word relates to other words, think about related words and antonyms, practice using the word in a sentence, phrase, or conversation, read the word in context in an example sentence, or have the Pleco TTS read example sentences containing the word to you and repeat the sentence after the TTS said it to you. The goal is to gain some experience with the word so you are familiar enough to put it in your Anki and get it right within the first two or three tries.
Category 2 is “anchoring stuff to a context.” This means you should give your brain some related things it can glom onto to relate the word you’re trying to learn to something else. That means you should avoid studying a word by itself in Anki, and you should especially avoid studying a character by itself! The reason is that there is no context for your brain to use to create the memory you want! So, instead of studying a word or a character in Anki, you should study phrases or sentences! I found the sweet spot for me is around 6 to 10 characters in a phrase in my Anki deck. This is extremely important to understand! You must not study characters or individual words or you will be wasting a ton of time. This goes for any language you want to study in Anki.
Other types of context can also be used to make your Anki cards more useful. For example, you can have the target phrase of 6 to 10 characters on the front of your card, but maybe you can put the entire sentence on the back of it to get more context. Or, you can paste that 6 to 10 character phrase into image search and find the image that resonates the most with the meaning. Finally, you can acquire audio clips for the phrase. This is actually my most recommended part of my learning system that uses Anki. There are a couple ways to do this, but first let’s go over what a card might look like.
The front will have a written phrase in Mandarin. No pinyin, possibly an image can be on front for anchoring, but not all the time, since you won’t always have a picture when learning. Maybe 10 percent of cards have an image on the front, only my cards that were the most difficult at the time I learned them. When I review the card, I read the Mandarin phrase aloud and I visualize the meaning in my head.
On the back of the card, I’ll have an image on maybe 40 percent of cards. I can use this to easily check whether I understand the meaning without having to stop suppressing my English in my thoughts. Since I can stay in Mandarin mode, images are more useful as an anchor here. Once I read aloud the card and imagine its meaning, I flip the card over. On the back of the card I always have spoken audio, which plays automatically. I mentally compare the way I said the phrase to the way the card said the phrase, and I repeat the phrase again. I also have the pinyin on some of the cards, but I’m moving away from this as I learn more and have gotten used to the way the pinyin corresponds to the pronunciation. The audio is enough to determine whether I read the card right or not, including tones. If I got close enough, which is typically quite close including pronouncing the tones, initial, and final sounds similarly to the audio on the card, then I mark the card as good and move on to the next. If I didn’t understand the meaning or didn’t get the reading right, I mark the card as again and proceed. Finally, if I read it right, but was relatively slow to be able to pronounce everything or had to take a couple tries to read it and the first one wasn’t right, I mark it as hard and proceed.
What you get with this system is a systematic and targeted practice that extends the boundary of your knowledge of speaking and reading with instant feedback. You should spend maybe 20-30 minutes on this per day and no more.
There is one elephant in the room that I’ve left out completely, which is how to get the audio for the card. There are several different ways you can do this. The most expedient is to use a TTS on the phrase. There are some TTS voices that are fairly natural these days, and you can add them to your Anki cards. I recommend Microsoft Yunxi the most. It has pretty natural pronunciation of tones and can even drop the pitch over the course of the sentence which happens naturally in most sentences in Mandarin. You can search for “anki edge tts” for some programs which will let you use this voice for personal use using the same endpoints used by Microsoft Edge for TTS speech production. Another good alternative for the TTS is Kagi Translate, which you have to pay a subscription for, but which also helps you break down sentences and the nuances between different potential translations. You can simply download the audio from Kagi Translate, but it takes a little more manual work than some of the Edge TTS solutions.
I’m hitting character limit, so wait for post #2.
There’s another way to get audio for your flashcards, which is to take the audio directly from native speakers. The disadvantage of this is you can’t choose what they are going to say unless you pay them for a language lesson. You can do this of course, on italki or something similar, but you can also use something like a podcast or a TV show as an audio source. Most TV shows have hard subs but if you can find a video that also has softsubs it will save you the trouble of using Whisper to get the transcription or transcribing the audio yourself and cross checking it with the hard subs. The advantage of this is that you are working towards understanding content at a native level while doing this, and you also know the pronunciation is going to be 100 percent authentic and trustworthy as something you can imitate. These are considerable advantages, so I would definitely recommend using native speaker audio as much as you can and putting it on the back of your flashcards.
asbplayer and yomitan are a good pair of browser extensions that can help with the workflow of making flashcards from native level content.
Finally, I have Anki give me the most recently added sentences first. I am constantly adding new stuff that is highly targeted to the words I need to work on most to my Anki deck, so studying the most recently added sentences first keeps my deck highly relevant to what I need to target most.
To sum things up, use Anki to study words and phrases on the boundary of your knowledge daily for 20 to 30 minutes a day. Use the leech threshold to suspend cards that have too weak of memory for Anki to be useful. Put high quality audio on the back of the card and imitate it. Don’t use your native language on your Anki cards to help suppress all other languages than your target language. Use images and audio for anchoring. Use pinyin on the back of the card if you need it to understand which syllables were said, but try to reduce your use of pinyin over time. Finally, study 6 to 10 character phrases or sentences and use images sometimes to give your brain more context and learn more efficiently.
What do you do with the leeches you suspended? Simply go through your list of leeches every so often and identify the word that tripped you up. If you still want to learn that word, find or create a different phrase or sentence that uses it. Put the meaning image on the front of the card to help anchor memory of the reading, as the word is still likely difficult. Since you are learning phrases, you can always get a new phrase for your leeches, so you don’t need to waste time trying to learn a phrase that’s not working for you right now. This is the reason why the low leech threshold is not a big deal, you’re not going to miss anything because you can just make another card.
So, that covers your 20 to 30 minutes of Anki per day. What should you do to study now that you’re done with that? There are three things you should focus on besides Anki. That is, practice composing sentences in Mandarin, practice speaking and listening by shadowing and chorusing, and practice reading and speaking by extensive reading, reading aloud sometimes. You can also take practice quizzes to find which words you need to target the most, but this can be a secondary concern as you can often find what you need to practice from extensive reading.
Composing sentences should be done for 15 minutes a day every day. This practice is how you are going to bridge the gap to being able to speak conversationally. Kagi Translate is useful in this practice. Here’s how you do it: pick a phrase you want to be able to use more effectively in your conversations, probably of 4 to 10 characters in length. Then type or speak maybe three original sentences that use the phrase. Have Kagi Translate translate the phrase back into your native language. This will help you understand the nuanced meaning of the sentence you composed, and at this point you can alter the meaning of the sentence in your native language to get closer to the original meaning you wanted. Finally, you can translate the revised sentence back into Mandarin and choose the variant with the right nuance that you want. This practice helps you understand mistakes you made while creating the sentence and gives you a lot of feedback on the nuances of the sentence and the words you used in it. If your original sentence was incorrect, put the new and improved sentence in your Anki deck with an image and a TTS reading to reinforce the memory. Since it’s a sentence you tried to write in the first place, the memory should be good enough that Anki can be useful. This practice is highly recommended to move towards being conversational.
You can also narrate what you’re doing in Mandarin. Say things like ”我去洗手间“ or “我要去洗手间” when you go for a pish. Say things like “我在给土豆去呀” when you are prepping potatoes for your dinner. Kagi Translate and Pleco can help you find the right words for this if you don’t know them. This is a great way to reinforce your vocabulary with anchoring, since you are associating the action, the space you’re doing it in, and the senses of doing the action with the vocabulary in Mandarin. Just do this as much as you can, no matter how silly or stupid it might make you feel. That embarrassment feeling can also reinforce the memory, which is what we want. So doing this in front of other people is ideal, especially if they think you are a psycho for doing it. You should do this as much as possible.
Extensive reading should also be done as much as possible. “Extensive reading” means you can understand 97% of the characters on the page or more. “Intensive reading” means you can understand 90 to 97%. “Fucked up reading” means you can understand 0 to 90%. You want to avoid fucked up reading completely and aim for extensive reading as it’s more efficient for learning than intensive reading. “How do I read stuff that I can understand 97% of when I’m stupid and don’t know anything?” is a very important question to be able to answer. Luckily, there are the Mandarin Companion Breakthrough Level graded readers. These are the first graded readers you should try. You can move on from them once you get to a reading speed of about 100 characters per minute. If you cannot understand them at 97%, that’s OK. What you’re going to do in that case is take phrases from the graded reader that you can understand and put them in your Anki deck. This is a situation where you can justify spending more than 30 minutes a day on Anki, as the goal is to bootstrap you quickly into being able to read the breakthrough reader. You can do the reading practice in Pleco, which lets you read any epub or pdf which you can find on the internet, or you can use Du Chinese to avoid some of the effort of finding stuff at a level you can use for extensive reading. The rule of thumb is to set a one minute timer and if you have to look more than 3 words up in a minute, you should look for something easier to stay in extensive reading.
When you are doing extensive reading, highlight phrases you don’t know well in Pleco and add them to your Anki deck. Pleco has built-in functionality to do this but it takes some setup. If you can’t figure it out then feel free to ask. This is a very important source of sentences for your Anki. If you use Du Chinese you can use its built in SRS, focusing on being able to pronounce the word in its context in the sentence.
Intensive reading is also beneficial as you get exposure to a wider variety of new words without things being too overwhelming. In this case it’s the most beneficial to read along with the TTS. You can do this in Pleco or Du Chinese.
Du Chinese is definitely an app that I would recommend as you get access to well-graded stories and can easily read at your level up to the point you can start reading novels at a native level. You have to pay to get access to entire stories, but it can definitely be worth it if you have money.
Heavenly Path is also worth mentioning at this point. They have links to a lot of resources you can use in your extensive reading practice. You must click this link and put it in your bookmarks if you do nothing else: https://heavenlypath.notion.site/
Shadowing and chorusing is done by going on a video site, finding a video on your level, and imitating the speaker as they speak. You got some good options here. GoEast Mandarin, Mandarin Click, and Xiaogua Chinese are all good choices for beginners that have graded their videos to a variety of levels. Little Fox Chinese has videos geared towards children that are not as well graded, but introduce a wider variety of vocabulary to you that you will need to know at some point. If you shadow a video that has less than like 93% words you know, you need to bookmark it, come back to it again the next day and again in a week, and shadow it again each time. To this end it’s best to shadow videos that you find the most interesting or that are a series in a story. Shadowing TV shows once you’re able to is ideal for this.
Chorusing means you read the hard subs on the video in unison with the speaker. Doing this means you can keep up with the speaker with your reading speed. This is an ideal situation and you won’t be able to do it right away. That’s OK, just keep trying.
Dong Chinese is a paid website that helps you select media for shadowing and chorusing. You select words you don’t know to view the short pronunciation and definition. Dong Chinese keeps track of the words you click and uses that to inform the best level of videos you can currently shadow. They also have quizzes that you can easily harvest sentences from to your Anki. For example, they have images annotated with captions which you can take phrases from and already have a highly relevant image for anchoring. Dong Chinese is one of the best ways to do practice that targets the boundary of your knowledge.
In conclusion the sites and apps I recommend are:
- Pleco for graded reading, sentence harvesting, looking up and learning new words
- Anki for reinforcing memory of phrases with repetition and pronunciation practice
- Edge TTS or Kagi Translate to add audio to arbitrary phrases in Anki
- Whisper to easily transcribe audio to text phrases for Anki
- Shadow libraries for graded readers at your level
- Or Du Chinese if you don’t want to put in the work to find content on your level and have money
- Youtube channels with slow Chinese, to use for shadowing and chorusing
- Little Fox, to use for shadowing and chorusing, use repetition to compensate for poor grading
- Dong Chinese to keep track of content at your level for shadowing and chorusing practice and to give you phrases appropriate for your level in Anki
- Kagi Translate to help practice writing sentences while understanding nuances in the meaning more easily and correcting mistakes
- Or another translation app if you don’t want to pay for Kagi
- Finally, italki to get tutoring in the language and bridge the gap to speaking if you have money
- Or language learning discords if you don’t
- Finally use Heavenly Path to help find extensive reading materials at your level
After doing all this you should be able to make some good progress on your Mandarin pretty efficiently.
I also recommend not trying to adopt this entire learning system all at once. You will definitely be overwhelmed. Just start with a couple things every like 4 days, you should be able to adopt the whole thing piecemeal.
Yeah start with pleco and the low-stroke count but frequently seen characters. 一二三四日月男女人左右 etc
My one piece of advice right off the bat, unless you have a specific need to write as a non native don’t bother. Learning to write Chinese is mostly useless for people who’s main interactions/uses will most likely be in person or online thanks to pinyin input keyboards. Focus on pronunciation and character recognition.
You need it for the hsk but it should not be a priority.
Yeah but hsk is far from a necessity
Wouldn’t writing help recognize characters?
Possibly but writing in Chinese is much more convoluted than many other languages thanks to stroke order and the like so I’d still say youd be way better off replacing it with simply a bunch of comprehensible input. Read loads of kids books/books for beginners and watch a bunch of cartoons/shows with simple language in chinese with subtitles.
Ok thanks for the tips!
I’m maybe around HSK2, native eng speaker. Here’s what I’ve done:
- mostly used HelloChinese (I believe this is very similar to duolingo)
- I browse xiaohongshu
- Pleco: dictionary and hanzi char meaning
- Recently I’ve been trying out comprehensible chinese. See the “Lazy Chinese - comprehensible input” youtube channel
LazyChinese is a great channel.
I can’t recommend this app enough, it’s got a really good structure and breaks lessons up into short exercises, it’s helped me a lot https://www.superchinese.com/
If you like SciFi TV shows, there is a version of The Three Body Problem that’s pretty good.
I think you can find versions of pop songs and Christmas songs with Chinese lyrics.
If you like SciFi TV shows, there is a version of The Three Body Problem that’s pretty good.
I found it kind of boring myself, but it’s head and shoulders better than the Netflix version; it’s certainly extremely cerebral and impresses me on an intellectual level, but at a certain point I felt like I’d like to see some cool stuff on screen (still though, easily better than the Netflix version; I couldn’t even finish the first episode on that one)
If you want watch/interact with Chinese media then I’d recommend https://www.youtube.com/@MadeByBilibili Many different Chinese animated shows and everything should have english subtitles too. I also recommend watching Ling Cage. It’s a cool animated scifi show and it’s also for free on that channel and all the episodes there are so far are in one video: https://youtu.be/rqD66LrLYHI
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Yeah, I never really liked Duolingo. It never seemed to actually teach you useful things, unless you were looking at the alphabet section or whatever.
I’ve been on 小红书 (Rednote) for a year this month and I think it’s decent for very soft learning. I’ve never actually tried to learn the language through the app, but I’ve picked up plenty stuff through using it. There’s plenty of people who put out videos going over language rules and characters too.
My school offers Mandarin classes, the teacher’s been there and taught for a year and a half and his wife is Chinese, and they’ve been okay; certainly more than I could think to do even with effort. I’ve never really gotten into language learning outside of school, so school learning is the only way I know how. I think at this point I could probably pass the HSK 1 no problem; not so sure about HSK 2, I’ve never looked for the vocabulary list or anything.
It seems a lot of advice is to watch media containing it; kids shows if you have to; if you see a word or phrase you don’t know, write it down and look it up; maybe change your phone to be in Chinese so your forced to see it. I’d also have to assume that one of the better ways might be getting immersed in the language. If you’re confident enough, go on chatrooms or even to the country itself.
Hope your learning goes well.
Prolewiki has A Statesian Marxist’ Guide to Learning Mandarin, might be helpful.
I’ve been wondering about that myself. I tried various apps and some of them for over a year too (mainly because apps make it easier to keep at the habit and stay motivated). I find there are some repeat problems. This is based on using the Google Play store to find apps:
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Because Duolingo is so obscenely successful compared to others, most other language apps with any success converge on changing their UI to be more like Duolingo’s. Two in fact that I had liked for a while, HelloChinese and LingoDeer, did this some time back (destroying a cool and unique UI design they’d previously had in the process).
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Monetization is hell (yay late stage capitalism). Those same apps I mentioned before, they also added microtransactions on top of a subscription cost. These MTX don’t seem to be there for much of anything, but they are there, and put me off. Once an app has MTX, it will be motivated to put artificial barriers in place somehow, in order to drive you to MTX.
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Some apps are crash grab city and reek of copy/pasting. A good example is Ling, which boasts offering tons of different languages to learn, but the learning process is ass. No teaching of grammar in sight and it throws you right into complex combinations of words with no explanation for why they combine the way they do.
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Too many apps add “spaced repetition” through review and act like this is accomplishing something meaningful. In my experience, review means nothing if I haven’t yet internalized in the first place. It just becomes a thing of me saying “yeah I have no idea, what is the answer?”
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Nobody actually seems to have a clue how to teach a language through an app and they’re mostly throwing darts at a board / repeating ideas other financially successful apps tried. Because it’s more about making money than learning (yay capitalism).
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You can learn some stuff sometimes, but going the rest of the way is the hard part. This is the part I’m consistently stuck on and I’m not sure apps really can do anything about it. I even tried TalkMe for a year or so, where AI is used to help you practice conversation, but there was so much of a gap in my conversational skills, it either took me painfully long to work out a response (using Google Translate or Pleco to help) or I went with some suggested response from the AI and spoke it to at least get practice with pronunciation/talking (but this kind of trivializes the point of being able to converse from your own thoughts).
I feel these kind of apps tend to consistently fail on teaching building blocks, such that you can piece things together yourself, and just generally go through concepts too fast, probably so they can say that you’re learning X number of words in just a few months or whatever. Kids spend literal years going through grade levels of reading and these apps are like, okay, you did like one short lesson on this grammar rule illustrated via a few static repeating examples, you have it memorized for life now, right? Oh, you don’t? That’s okay, we’ll just have you spaced repetition the same repeat examples for the next year. Surely it’ll stick at some point.
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I am a teacher, but I teach Russians and Ukrainians English, so techniques might not translate 1 to 1, but I would suggest looking out for media and building a very basic vocabulary using a dictionary and translating the words to your native language. Then, once you’re comfy with a base, ditch the dictionary and get a chinese-only one - a dictionary where new chinese words are explained using simple chinese, so that you build up a habit of thinking in chinese eventually (this process will take a long while, possibly years). As for the base that you have to build up before that - can’t exactly say how much you’ll need. Look for media in chinese with english or native subtitles and try to listen to it multiple times, piecing together what stuff means. Additionally, try to look for pirated textbooks. IIRC chinese grammar is simple and elegant, but you still will have to learn it.
I know you said you don’t want to get a teacher, but languages are among the hardest things to learn in the world. The reason you don’t know anything after 2 months of self-teaching is because self-teaching something this complicated and difficult is worthless. Get a teacher.
