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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   1931 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 14, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Chinese learners, where do you start? It's a tonal language with an impenetrable writing system. I know there are other Category 5 languages out there, but this one is probably the hardest to start, right? Japanese was easy to start; just read Genki and start doing the homework. Anyway, how do you start learning Chinese?

  • Decide if you want to learn PRC (Mainland) Chinese or ROC (Taiwan) Chinese. Taiwan has its own phonetic writing/typing system which is not pinyin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo), and uses traditional hanzi rather than simplified characters.
  • Decide what your goal is. Do you want to speak, write, or pass a test? If the goal is only speaking, learning ideographical writing will bog you down. All the official textbooks out of PRC/ROC will tell you to learn writing, but if speed is the goal, you can learn to speak at an elementary school level without Hanzi. HSK requires you learn writing. Choose your goal, at least for the first six months.
  • If speaking/listening is part of your goal, decide which dialect to focus on. Most resources teach "Mandarin" (again, PRC or ROC) but there are also a lot of resources for Cantonese.
  • How motivated are you, how immersed are you, and what is your timeline? If your timeline is less than six months ... prepare to learn a few travel phrases and have a bad accent. If your timeline is more than a year, you can reasonably expect to learn to understand simple spoken language or written text (but not both!) or learn to speak in simple phrases without any accent at all.
Motivation, immersion, disclaimer

I have not learned Chinese. I have learned Korean to fluency and then tried to adapt my method to Chinese. After a few years my personal circumstances changed so I completely lost interest. I feel much happier now focusing on Korean again.

Back when I started learning Korean, the core of my learning strategy was adapted from AJATT. It seems the website is down now, but the core of it is summarized here: https://learnanylanguage.fandom.com/wiki/All_Japanese_All_The_Time

The core idea is that learning language properly takes a lot of thinking about the language and thinking in the language, so it is a motivation and immersion game. Studying is hard, so you need to motivate yourself through fun (throw out any resource which gets boring), immerse (in fun things!), and use spaced repetition to optimize your memorization (while deleting any boring flashcards).

A tangential idea from AJATT is that you should only take advice from people who have already "walked the path" (or less politely, don't take dieting advice from a fat person).

I have not walked the path for Chinese, only started the hike and lost interest. I recommend finding some blogs of people who have mastered Chinese fluently and see what resources they found most useful. But here are the resources, strategies, and philosophies I used to start learning mainland Mandarin.

The following assumes you are very motivated and your timeline is measured in years. I was not very motivated for Mandarin, so my studying was limited to 25 minutes per day of non-immersion. After three years, I wouldn't pass a beginner test. For immersion in a language school in Beijing, I hear the timeline is one summer to one semester to learn to hear the sounds and pronounce them accurately. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

Listening/speaking
  • Non-native speakers develop a foreign accent because they start speaking before they know what the language is supposed to sound like or before they are comfortable sounding like a native speaker. This becomes a bad habit which they cannot fix. If your end goal is to speak fluently, start with lots of listening (so you know what the sounds should be) and deliberate phoneme generation in a low-pressure environment (so you can generate the sounds accurately). It is much easier to learn slowly than to fix a bad accent.
  • I made Anki cards for syallables to learn to distinguish tones by downloading the University of Michigan phonemes database (https://tone.lib.msu.edu/) to create a 2400-note deck for phoneme -> pinyin and back. This was probably a bad idea, because the Univeristy of Michigan tones are really slow and native speakers think they sound funny. Learning to hear the tones was a slow process. It took me two years to finish studying my deck (on my commute time). There are downloadable "quiz" apps with more native speech for learning to hear the tones, but they aren't spaced repetition and don't cover the whole set of possible phonemes. The holy grail would be an Anki or Mnemnosyne deck which has good native pronounciation of individual syllables and covers all legal phonemes.
  • Find some good source audio of slow sentences (like from a textbook) and use Audacity to cut it into pieces and make flashcards for transcription and listening practice. Use Anki or Mnemosyne for the spaced repetition. This will give good listening practice and make you more familiar with the intonations. For bonus points, you can "repeat after" the cards, but I wouldn't recommend that until you can consistenly differentiate the sounds you are supposed to be repeating. If using Anki, I would create a separate auto-generated card type for repeating after a card, and have it introduced after listening to the relevant card has been mastered. I often practiced this next to a native speaker to make sure I wasn't forming bad habits.
  • Repetition is the holy grail of listening. You can learn the flow and intonation of a language perfectly just with enough repetition. Spaced repetition is most efficient, but any repetition will work. For Korean, I found a single expisode of a good drama with a lot of male lines and listened to it 100 times while doing other things.
  • But for understanding, the best method (according to research) is by explicit (grammar) instruction followed by input that is mostly comprehensible.
  • So explicit instruction helps with priming what to listen for, and repetition is good for learning intonation and flow.
Writing
  • Heisig did a great thing and created a systematic way of learning the writing system which builds up the characters from simple to complicated, using memory hints to build stories about them. It works great for remembering how to write, but the meanings sometimes differ slightly from actual use so as to introduce common characters in memorable ways. So you will need to relearn a bit once you get immersed. (For example, the character that means "of" is memorized with the keyword "glue" in the Heisig system.) Here's a link collection and someone's blog about using Heisig quite aggressively: https://mandarinsegments.blogspot.com/2013/05/heisig-method-remembering-hanzi-full.html
  • Heisig will conflict with ROC or PRC-designed textbooks and language aptitude tests, because they have their own system for introducing characters which is based on usage frequency rather than making conceptual connections. But it looks like the guy in that blog learned 500 characters in 18 days and 1000 characters in 46 days. So maybe you can delay the textbooks for a month while you focus on the basic characters.

Back when I started learning Korean, the core of my learning strategy was adapted from AJATT. It seems the website is down now, but the core of it is summarized here: https://learnanylanguage.fandom.com/wiki/All_Japanese_All_The_Time

It's not down, it just moved from alljapaneseallthetime.com to alljapanesealltheti.me

Oh thank you! So much nostalgia! Now https://alljapanesealltheti.me/index.htm returns "404 Page not found." but https://alljapanesealltheti.me/ works.

Whoops, fixed! Yeah, sorry, it was supposed to be https://alljapanesealltheti.me/index.html

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