Even for Chinese people, Journey to the West is a somewhat difficult text because it belongs to classical literature. Using some children's books published in recent years, and progressing gradually, might be a better approach?
I’m trying to learn to speak Chinese and not read it yet. The issue is most of the language learning apps have a focus on characters. I feel like I just want to see the pinyin. Maybe I don’t know what I need, but I haven’t found the right tool.
There's a language learning method where you just listen to audio, until you develop a basic familiarity with the language. (Then learn reading and writing later.)
You listen to audio you don't understand yet, and over time your brain begins to pick up the patterns. It takes a lot of time but you can do it in the background, because that processing happens subconsciously. So you can get that time "for free".
But he got it from linguist Stephen Krashen and his Input Hypothesis of language acquisition. (i.e. that the way babies and kids learn languages, thru osmosis, works for adults too.)
I think the ideal solution is somewhere in the middle, starting with something like Pimsleur which is the same idea (audio and repetition) but more structured and focused, to give you that "seed" of vocabulary and grammar, before you flesh it out with the "long tail" of the language.
To add a bit more to this: AJATT (all Japanese all the time) later evolved into MIA (mass input approach), which then became Refold.
The gist of those methods is mass input + create SRS cards for sentences where only one word or grammar pattern is unfamiliar to you.
A similar but more relaxed approach is ALG (automatic language growth), where you start from very basic input with lots of visual aids and let the language “wash over you”: no taking notes, no creating flashcards, no dictionary lookups. Sounds crazy, but it works for a lot of people. It’s the method behind Dreaming Spanish, which was inspired by the teaching method at the AUA language school in Bangkok, where Dr. J Marvin Brown used Stephen Krashen’s ideas to create a Natural Approach course to teach foreigners Thai from zero to fluency.
As someone who did most of Pimsleur Spanish and Mandarin (and did a single unit in various other languages), and has since continued learning these languages (I'm currently taking 4-5 hours of Spanish class a day in Spain), my two cents is that Pimsleur is fine for gaining confidence in the basic phrases of a language, but is a pretty poor tool if you want to actually learn a language. imo it focuses too much on set phrases without practicing further application.
For adults learning a language, I think you need 3 things to be most efficient. You need to learn the grammar rules/structure, you need vocabulary, and you need lots and lots of content. The specificity of Pimsleur I think is a major blocker. It lacks both vocabulary and content, and there is often a better resource for explaining grammar. I guess maybe the first unit of each Pimsleur course is pretty ok for getting used to the mouthfeel of a language, though.
For Spanish, I got far more out of languagetransfer.org, which helped me understand the concepts of the language much more, and dreaming.com, which gave me lots of content. For Chinese, I haven't found a course I like, but I still think I got more from drilling characters (I made my own app, but something like hanzihero or just an HSK/TOCFL Anki deck is probably good) and using graded readers. I think spoken-first in Chinese is a little bit of a trap, because it's easier to remember things with the written characters, when the relationships between words is a bit more clear.
edit: oh also sidenote, it's been a long time since I used it, but iirc, the Mandarin one is particularly outdated (eg talks about using a phone book) and uses a Beijing dialect, so everyone in Taipei made fun of me the first time I went there.
Thanks! I think getting comfortable with characters fairly early is important, as it helps shift your mindset into the right place. That said, I don’t think this project really works until you’re comfortable with at least ~60 characters.
I recently changed all my language flashcards to be like this. Anki is probably the best option. I have the field with the Hanzi, but just configure my cards not to show it at the moment, so I break the habit of translating everything to characters in my head when I'm trying to listen. It's worked well, and the characters will be there when I decire to do something with them again.
Enjoyers of this concept would probably like this wonderful talk about programming language design by Guy Steele (Sun, Java Language): Growing a Language
It is so inspiring. Recently, I've been thinking of making a side project using LLMs for learning new languages too. Transformers were originally designed for machine translation and now we have much better ones. My idea is to write a mobile app which I have zero experience.
Cool idea! You mentioned the model struggling with Chinese a bit. Have you tried any Chinese models, e.g. DeepSeek or GLM? I imagine they probably have a lot more Chinese in the pretraining. (And their English is certainly fine too!)
Even for Chinese people, Journey to the West is a somewhat difficult text because it belongs to classical literature. Using some children's books published in recent years, and progressing gradually, might be a better approach?
In the late 1800s/early 1900s there were books published "in words of one syllable" -- e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice%27s_Adventures_in_Wonder...
More: https://triviumpursuit.com/childrens-books-in-words-of-one-s...
Related: https://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/al.html
This is a really smart idea.
I’m trying to learn to speak Chinese and not read it yet. The issue is most of the language learning apps have a focus on characters. I feel like I just want to see the pinyin. Maybe I don’t know what I need, but I haven’t found the right tool.
There's a language learning method where you just listen to audio, until you develop a basic familiarity with the language. (Then learn reading and writing later.)
You listen to audio you don't understand yet, and over time your brain begins to pick up the patterns. It takes a lot of time but you can do it in the background, because that processing happens subconsciously. So you can get that time "for free".
I learned it from this guy https://alljapanesealltheti.me/index.html
But he got it from linguist Stephen Krashen and his Input Hypothesis of language acquisition. (i.e. that the way babies and kids learn languages, thru osmosis, works for adults too.)
I think the ideal solution is somewhere in the middle, starting with something like Pimsleur which is the same idea (audio and repetition) but more structured and focused, to give you that "seed" of vocabulary and grammar, before you flesh it out with the "long tail" of the language.
To add a bit more to this: AJATT (all Japanese all the time) later evolved into MIA (mass input approach), which then became Refold.
The gist of those methods is mass input + create SRS cards for sentences where only one word or grammar pattern is unfamiliar to you.
A similar but more relaxed approach is ALG (automatic language growth), where you start from very basic input with lots of visual aids and let the language “wash over you”: no taking notes, no creating flashcards, no dictionary lookups. Sounds crazy, but it works for a lot of people. It’s the method behind Dreaming Spanish, which was inspired by the teaching method at the AUA language school in Bangkok, where Dr. J Marvin Brown used Stephen Krashen’s ideas to create a Natural Approach course to teach foreigners Thai from zero to fluency.
Pimsleur is also a great place to start for spoken fist
As someone who did most of Pimsleur Spanish and Mandarin (and did a single unit in various other languages), and has since continued learning these languages (I'm currently taking 4-5 hours of Spanish class a day in Spain), my two cents is that Pimsleur is fine for gaining confidence in the basic phrases of a language, but is a pretty poor tool if you want to actually learn a language. imo it focuses too much on set phrases without practicing further application.
For adults learning a language, I think you need 3 things to be most efficient. You need to learn the grammar rules/structure, you need vocabulary, and you need lots and lots of content. The specificity of Pimsleur I think is a major blocker. It lacks both vocabulary and content, and there is often a better resource for explaining grammar. I guess maybe the first unit of each Pimsleur course is pretty ok for getting used to the mouthfeel of a language, though.
For Spanish, I got far more out of languagetransfer.org, which helped me understand the concepts of the language much more, and dreaming.com, which gave me lots of content. For Chinese, I haven't found a course I like, but I still think I got more from drilling characters (I made my own app, but something like hanzihero or just an HSK/TOCFL Anki deck is probably good) and using graded readers. I think spoken-first in Chinese is a little bit of a trap, because it's easier to remember things with the written characters, when the relationships between words is a bit more clear.
edit: oh also sidenote, it's been a long time since I used it, but iirc, the Mandarin one is particularly outdated (eg talks about using a phone book) and uses a Beijing dialect, so everyone in Taipei made fun of me the first time I went there.
Pimsleur is awful for Mandarin. I wish I hadn’t wasted my time on it.
Thanks! I think getting comfortable with characters fairly early is important, as it helps shift your mindset into the right place. That said, I don’t think this project really works until you’re comfortable with at least ~60 characters.
I recently changed all my language flashcards to be like this. Anki is probably the best option. I have the field with the Hanzi, but just configure my cards not to show it at the moment, so I break the habit of translating everything to characters in my head when I'm trying to listen. It's worked well, and the characters will be there when I decire to do something with them again.
Enjoyers of this concept would probably like this wonderful talk about programming language design by Guy Steele (Sun, Java Language): Growing a Language
https://youtu.be/_ahvzDzKdB0
It is so inspiring. Recently, I've been thinking of making a side project using LLMs for learning new languages too. Transformers were originally designed for machine translation and now we have much better ones. My idea is to write a mobile app which I have zero experience.
This is extremely interesting, great idea. Really both thumbs up. Looking for more ideas/lifehack approaches to learning via LLMs.
Interesting concept! Think this would be quite cool to explore. Personally am very interested in language learning concepts / apps.
My first concerns though:
1. How can the system know which words I already know.
2. To what degree will I misunderstand the meaning of words.
3. Somewhat related to 2, how inaccurate will be description / explanation of words be.
Cool idea! You mentioned the model struggling with Chinese a bit. Have you tried any Chinese models, e.g. DeepSeek or GLM? I imagine they probably have a lot more Chinese in the pretraining. (And their English is certainly fine too!)
How hard would it be to add new languages ?
This is genius! I love it.