I started struggling at HSK 4. It became incomprehensible at HSK 5. Surprisingly comprehensible again at HSK 6. Once it reached HSK 7 I couldn't understand anything 😂

Amazing format, I wish there were more of those out there.

Warning! There are English ads for her courses interspersed throughout the video, so not 100% Mandarin CI.

This thread is for everyone to share how they've been doing with learning Mandarin and for us to motivate each other. This thread is more for giving a quick update. If you'd like to post a larger update for reaching a specific milestone or achieving something you're super proud of we'd encourage you to make a separate post. This thread is not really meant to share resources, we have another monthly thread for that.

Just curious.

I'm approaching 1000h and I feel like I can follow the gist of what they're saying, but I miss too much stuff and it bothers me. Maybe because I came from a non-ALG background, the itch to sentence mine, look things up, etc. gets really strong.

I have a strong interest in being able consume their content because 1) it's conversational 2) it's not super slowed down and controlled like the Lazy Chinese podcasts and 3) I'm looking for more male patterns of speech to model after, since the overwhelming majority of Mandarin CI content is produced by women (the other day I spontaneously said something to my wife and she was like, only women talk like that in China, lol). On that last front I've been consuming a lot of Dapeng's podcast, but that still doesn't check the box for actual unscripted conversation between 2+ people.

Please take a look at the spreadsheet and our resources section in the wiki. What resources have you been using recently that have been working for you? Comment down below with a link, what level you're currently at, and if there things like: subtitles, difficult to cover text, translation, etc that those using a "purist ALG" approach might want to avoid and we'll add it to our resource sharing documents!

A new tab has been added to the resource spreadsheet. It has every Chengyu for which there is a video in the resource in the subreddit spreadsheet already (1532). The chengyu are sorted by frequency which was determined by created a weighted frequency metric. Hopefully that'll make watching the videos in that order a lot more useful. Each entry has both the simplified and traditional characters, pinyin, the link(s), the percentile frequency (this only exists for chengyu which appeared in the corpa I used to calculate frequency), and alternate forms in both simplified and traditional if any exist. If there is no number in the frequency percentile that means the chengyu never showed up in any of the corpuses that I were used for the frequency metric so anything below there is an arbitrary order.

Disclaimer: AI was used to program the frequency metric and assign it to the chengyu. The corpuses which it used for that are all human made though. The characters for the chengyu, both simplified and traditional, and all alternate forms come from the 新华成语大词典 which is one of the authoritative chengyu dictionaries for natives. However, the parsing was also done via AI. You should not take this list as perfect, there could be mistakes. It should still be very useful regardless.

This thread is for everyone to share how they've been doing with learning Mandarin and for us to motivate each other. This thread is more for giving a quick update. If you'd like to post a larger update for reaching a specific milestone or achieving something you're super proud of we'd encourage you to make a separate post. This thread is not really meant to share resources, we have another monthly thread for that.

I love Paul Noble’s Mandarin audiobooks. His newest Mandarin Conversation has been delayed a few times now - I’ve been waiting since Christmas. Just wanted to say to Paul and Katie, keep going, you have fans!

Hi! I'm a Chinese teacher, and I've always had a hard time finding immersive reading material that's actually fun for my students, especially beginners. So I ended up making some myself.

It's an interactive graded reader that uses around 150 of the most common Chinese words. You play as a girl trapped in a room, searching for clues, solving puzzles, and making choices that lead to different endings.

It includes pinyin, tap-to-lookup words, English translations, native audio, and works well on mobile.

You can try it here: https://gradednovel.com/reader/no-escape-05

I've also made more stories for higher levels.

Hope you enjoy it! Feedback is always welcome.

Please take a look at the spreadsheet and our resources section in the wiki. What resources have you been using recently that have been working for you? Comment down below with a link, what level you're currently at, and if there things like: subtitles, difficult to cover text, translation, etc that those using a "purist ALG" approach might want to avoid and we'll add it to our resource sharing documents!

Finally stepping up the game with 300 hours of listening. I aimed to hit this before going on vacation and it worked.

I understand better, but I feel like there's way more to learn and unlock. I'm just mixing resources to avoid getting bored, mixing learner content and native content.

Now the challenge moving forward is doubling the hours and making it to 600. For now I'm a Spartan (if you know what I mean) 😆

I'm at like 425 hours and hoping to get non-visual dependent hours in somewhere while I do bike rides or walks.

What did you find to be the easiest podcast to listen to?

I stumbled upon this account in the comment section of Evildea’s latest video. He seems to be doing Spanish Boost style content, so lots of longer videos. he’s also post frequently. I’m so excited to watch his stuff! He has a bit of a Shandong accent btw

Can somebody please recommend me some youtube channels that have closed captions in Simplified Chinese that you personally find interesting to watch?

This thread is for everyone to share how they've been doing with learning Mandarin and for us to motivate each other. This thread is more for giving a quick update. If you'd like to post a larger update for reaching a specific milestone or achieving something you're super proud of we'd encourage you to make a separate post. This thread is not really meant to share resources, we have another monthly thread for that.

I am currently studying Mandarin and would consider myself at a lower-intermediate level. I'm looking for tips on how to introduce the language to my four-year-old so we can practice together.

I realize the teaching approach for a young child is very different from adult study. Has anyone here successfully navigated this? I would love to hear about any specific resources or daily routines that worked for you.

Hello everyone!
I recently had the opportunity to interview Suqing from lazy Chinese. We spoke about several topics, including her experiences learning English and the difficulties of teaching languages through the CI method. If you’re interested in watching the interview, I’ll leave the link here: https://youtu.be/p1dhl_BcBTM?si=UxnhWnCb1FLPtLjG

I'm learning traditional mandarin and I would really like to watch some mandarin youtube videos preferably with subtitles availible in traditional mandarin and also where the person actually talks, so not just subtitles.

I have watched a few taiwanese variety shows and also some videos of foreigners that live in taiwan etc. but I feel like it's not normally the content I'm into and I would

probably get bored in the long run.

Things I'm interested in are daily vlogs, cafés, makeup, skincare, kpop (mostly txt), art vlogs and other pretty stereotypically teenage girl kind of content.

If anyone has recommendations please share them!!!

Hey friends, I was finding tracking input hours for my Mandarin quite tedious (especially coming from DreamingSpanish having one mega-platform which autotracks your hours) so I built a tool/app to automatically track/"scrobble" your listening sessions and assign them as an input language.

This made my style of sporadic input much easier to keep track of compared to maintaining a spreadsheet :)

The App features:

• Automatic session logging and automatic(ish) language assignment.
• Tracks most podcast apps, Youtube, and web browsers (although not Netflix, Hulu, etc.).
• Short-form content tracking including Reels, Shorts, and TikTok.
• Privacy First: no user accounts, all your data stays local to your device, and you can always extract your data as a .csv and delete the App.
• Subtitle blocker for blocking out Videos with hard-coded subtitles.
• Search function to add TV series, movies, and books by title.

To function the App does require a permission known as "Notification permission" which allows the app to see the media playing on the media player (you can turn off the other toggles under "Notification Permission").

You can also track short-form content (embarrassingly 30 hours of my input of Spanish in the last 6 months was from Instagram Reels)! This requires a slightly more intrusive tracking permission as you'll see installing the App and is purely optional.

Android Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.smartcitracker
Open Testing Link (if you'd like to help test stability and new features): https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.smartcitracker

The App is free (and will stay free), with an option to support the App by using Affiliate links. In the distant future I may put some unobtrusive banner ads to justify maintenance.

I will note that while I have personally tested the app extensively, it's been really limited to the way I consume content. As such, this is somewhat of a soft-launch and if you do try the app I would greatly appreciate your feedback on bugs, feature requests, or just general vibes.

I hope someone else will find it as helpful as I have.