12 Months of Mandarin

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

See also "The Art of Procrastination" (2012).

I’m a lot more familiar with Japanese than with mandarin (and use srs), and it’s worth noting than srs essentially turns anything into an extremely satisfying game : you learn quickly, you really wonder how far you can go, so you keep playing.

I believe that’s the killer combo : really wanting to do something, and having that something turned into a game to avoid giving up.

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.)

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.

If your purpose is to show off, yes, juggling wins.

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.

No need. :-) Comprehensible Input and immersive language usage can be your superpower.

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.

Create your own environment. Set your devices to the language you want to study. Consume content in that language. Instead of doing X in English, do X in your target language. It can be a processes of enriching substitution. This helps with technical skills as well, as there are also far fewer resources when you search an error message, and you need to be able to mentally grep the text quickly for what you're after.

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.

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.

* 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...

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

Front -> Word. Click button, shows random sentence out of 20.

Back -> Word and sentence translation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 wish I came up with a better title.

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

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.

"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:

https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:9b49365

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.

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.

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

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.

[1] https://isaak.net/mandarinmethods/#use-gpt

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.

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.

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.

    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.

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.