> 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.
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...
"Cannot be overstated" would mean it's impossible to talk too highly of it.
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:
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.
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.
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.
It only has 800 characters, though. But they are the most common.
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.
That's the same type of person who assumes you can become fluent purely through Duolingo.
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.
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)
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.
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).
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.
Just going to the suburbs of Shanghai will do it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Front -> Word. Click button, shows random sentence out of 20.
Back -> Word and sentence translation.
I use ChatGPT to check my answers to the exercises in my textbooks :)
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.
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.
-----
[*] 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.)
Spaced repetition system (or maybe software?) for people like me who were not familiar with this acronym.
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.
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.
Then you're not using Anki correctly.
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.
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.
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.
Fwiw, TFA's methods page[1] has a GPT section.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
I'm making an app to try to help with low level comprehensible input, posted elsewhere in this thread
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.
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 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.
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.
I wish I came up with a better title.
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.
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".
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.
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.
No need. :-) Comprehensible Input and immersive language usage can be your superpower.
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.
Disordered attention is the whole deal.
You might find it easy but that doesn't mean others will.
They might be recommending pharma here, but it would be prayer on another forum, or more protein intake on a third.
> 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'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.
s/dopamine/motivation/g
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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)
Also while naming quality resources I should also mention [Pleco](https://www.pleco.com/) - it's _definitely_ the best Chinese dictionary app - highly recommended.
* 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...
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.
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.
- 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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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 yearsI 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.
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.
"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.
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.
although w.r.t. myself? absolutely agree with the sentiment. I would wash out in half a week with that kind of workload.
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.
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.
It truly is an excellent hack.
The price for the motivation could be higher you're willing to pay.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Something similar happened to me -- did intensive Mandarin study in college followed by a summer in Beijing. Was incredible. Then continued with a language course back home, and watched as my vocabulary shrank -- something like 4 hrs/wk. of class couldn't even maintain my Mandarin, much less improve it. Today I'm still great with tones and pronunciation, but I can't understand a thing. 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.
Reading content that personally interests you is very important and often underrated.
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.