I know there is controversy about using AI, so I leave that to each person to decide for themselves whether they think it's ethical or not. If someone already uses AI anyway, here is my story. If someone doesn't use it now nor plan to use it in the future, I don't want to convert them. Just wanted to show what's possible and useful :)

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This autumn, I found myself panicking. I learned that November 7 is the last possible date for taking HSK 2.0, and somewhere between learning that and thinking it through, I was already registered for HSK 5 and holding plane tickets to fly my ass to the examination center.

Problem: I have a few weeks until the exam. Like I said, it was a spontaneous decision and I do not know all the required words nor grammar. No way I can get through the textbooks in time. No way I can perfectly memorize the 500 words I’m lacking. So how can I make this work? This is when I turned to AI.

Step 1: Schedule

I told my AI tool about my situation. Firstly, the deadline. Secondly, how I learn at the moment (watching dramas, reading books and articles, conversation classes twice a week) so it has some idea of what my strengths might be. Thirdly, I used Hack Chinese, my flashcard app of choice, to export all of my known words. I uploaded that .xlsx onto the AI, along with an HSK 5 vocabulary list. Then, I asked it to create a plan for me on how to best utilize those few weeks. At that point, I didn’t really expect much more; just to get a day-by-day schedule. It provided me with a structured calendar, and proactively offered support throughout the process.

Step 2: Mock test

The AI asked me to take a mock test so we can see my strengths and weaknesses. It had some ideas (for example, it assumed from the fact that I have conversations with a native twice a week that my listening skills would be fine) but we needed data.

I used HSK Mock that provides mock tests at all levels. They are paid but you can take them in the same way as you would the actual exam, and your writing is evaluated by a human examiner. I ended up 178 out of 300 points, where 180 is a passing grade. Not bad for the first attempt!

Per the AI’s prediction, I did fairly well in the listening section but I didn’t manage to do all my reading in time and I had to pick random answers just to have anything. What is comforting is that the randomly answered sections were my weakest ones.

Once I was done, I shared all my incorrect responses with the AI for analysis.

Step 3: Error log

The AI went through my mistakes and analyzed what had gone wrong. It was able not only to identify the errors but also see which ones needed good command of vocabulary, and which ones could have been fixed if I remembered grammar rules or just... didn't make typos.

Step 4: Time for action!

Once the AI has synthesized the information it gathered from my mock exam attempt, it came up with some tasks to help me get rid of the errors.

Firstly, it helped me decide which words to prioritize in my next vocabulary review. Secondly, it showed me grammar patterns I needed to learn; for each, I had to write example sentences so my brain can memorize it actively. And since the essays (if you can call an 80-character text that) make for an easy win when you compare the effort with the points you can score for them, the AI asked me to write a dozen of them so it can review and see if and how my writing improves.

Conclusion

I was surprised with how well the AI adjusted and updated its knowledge and approach to help me as I told it new things. It proved to be an excellent companion in those efforts, and something that a human unfortunately could not be. We cannot memorize someone’s entire vocabulary command and compare it with exam lists within seconds. We cannot keep a detailed log of their mistakes and adjust learning strategies on the go.

So do we even need human teachers anymore?

I think we absolutely do. Please consider the following:

1. I am where I am because of my teachers. It is them who dragged me from the bottom of the pit to where I am now. It’s not like one day I just started reading books.
2. Speaking and listening. One would argue that AI can do those things, too. However, my tool candidly pushed back and told me to practice those skills with humans. 
   1. Synthetic speech will never come close to humans I will encounter in life, and their way of communicating. 
   2. In order to actually have good listening skills, you need to listen to as many different people as you can. Otherwise, you won’t learn the language: you will learn a specific (non-)person pronunciation, cadence and vocabulary.
   3. Talking to a human is about much more than just words. Non-verbal cues make this experience much fuller.

So, can AI do what human teachers can’t? Yes, it can. But it also works the other way around. AI can help your learning journey but will not be in the driver’s seat.

Ok, but how can you replicate this?

I talked a lot, so now, here is a short checklist for you to replicate this method for your language exam, no matter the language:

• Export your vocabulary data. It is ideal if you already use a flashcard system. You can export a list of your known words and load it into your AI tool of choice.
• Take a mock test. Like I said, I used HSK Mock but it's paid. If you don't want to spend money and want to use some free mocks, ideally, you would also have an answer key so you can evaluate your answers. The AI processes both copy-pasted text and screenshots.
• Upload your data to the tool along with official exam requirements. This will serve as a baseline.
• Log every error. Ask your tool to run diagnostics on your data, find patterns in your errors, and keep track of them. My tool uses a markdown file for me that it keeps updating; I can also have a peek and see what is there.
• Provide the exam date and ask for a schedule. This will help you give your efforts some structure. Remember to mention how much time you can dedicate to studying each day, and any other details that can help tailor it to your needs. For example, I told the AI: “Monday to Friday, I only have time in the evenings and I will be tired so please keep it short.” - that is how my mock attempts got moved to Saturdays.
• Ask for prioritized exercises. Depending on your needs, you might be practicing sentence structures, longer pieces of writing, etc.
• AI is your diagnostician, not an oracle. It might suggest that your essays are bound to score 0 points because of wrongly used words when in fact, the human examiner will be lenient and give you 30% - and each point counts!

Final notes

Like I said before, HSK 3.0 is being launched worldwide very soon, so most probably the next exam you sign up for will be that. I would argue that this makes an even stronger case for why generative AI can be useful, especially in short-term situations like mine: we don't really have any materials at all aside from a few textbooks and PDFs describing the vocabulary lists and the scope. So it's not like we can just train with a workbook

Hope this is useful!

I’m flying to Chongqing in a few weeks for a vacation. My primary goal is to work on improving my Chinese, especially spoken. I’m around HSK 4 or 5, but don’t have a lot of speaking practice.

I have already booked a hotel and decided to look into finding a tutor or someone who can help me and give me feedback. So far my search has been more difficult than I imagined. I found Keats, but I feel like it’s more than I really need. I don’t need a place to stay, I just need someone to meet up with for a few hours in a restaurant, hotel lobby, or some other public space.

Does anyone have a recommendation for how I could organize something like this? I think I’ll look into tandem partners and language exchanges, but I think it would be a good idea to find someone who can explain things more in depth and to be honest I would like to speak as little English as possible during my trip, to really try for as much immersion as possible

As me and my 2 friends, we want to learn the Chinese language for free from good and interesting app.

That actually works and helps to learn and read the language.. is anyone know good app for that and tried, plz recommend us

Hey all, I just started HSK2 and I’ve been recently pretty self conscious about my hand writing — kept thinking its illegible. As a result of this repetitive thoughts echoing in my head, I decided to post here and ask locals and fellow learners instead.

I found this app here called LanLan to learn chinese doomscrolling and I dont know how to turn off pinyin. If youre the maker please DM me.

Can anyone help me with the Fuzhounese (福州話) romanization of 富貴? I found hó for 富 on
https://fuzhounese.org, but I couldn’t find the reference for 貴.

I've been studying Chinese on and off for 15 years, always trying to keep the cost as low as possible. I actually spent some of my study time hunting down affordable resources instead of studying Chinese! Free trials, YouTube channels, websites, apps, books, you name it.

What frustrated me was finding promising resource lists that were just walls of links with no descriptions, many times with more than a third of the links broken. I wished for the kind of directory that would actually deliver, saving me time, money, and frustration.

So I kept collecting and organizing what I found. Over the years, that grew to 1,000+ resources across more than 100 categories. As a retired legal secretary, organization and writing descriptions of things comes naturally to me. In 2018, I moved my collection to a website to make it easier to navigate and share. Every resource has a description and is labeled free, paid, or free trial. I also regularly check and repair broken links.

Since self-promotion is understandably a concern here, I want to be completely transparent.

My website has no ads, no paywall, and just two clearly labeled affiliate links. Those links (currently on 2 pages of a huge site) have earned me a grand total of 86 cents since 2018! 😂 I'm not monetized on social media either. There are optional donation links, but donations over the years haven't even covered two months of hosting, much less the other costs of maintaining the site. These costs are the only reason the donations links exist. If I could do it free I would.

Like all legitimate resource directories, some resources are paid, but I have no financial relationship with their providers. I'm not selling an app, steering people toward paid products, and never intend to put anything behind a paywall. I will shut the website down first. I simply want to give learners like me what I so desperately wished I had and retirement has given me the time to create.

This truly has been a labor of love for years.

Mods and others, please take a look, click around, and judge for yourself whether it's genuinely useful:

https://mandarinmania.com/resources/

Enjoy!

I just started studying sinology and thought about going to China next summer for about three months (planning to do a Chinese course, although I will have studied it two semesters at this point).

Do you guys recommend doing it, considering it would be quite expensive for me and how did your Chinese improve during this time period?

Hey Guys,

I am part of a team running a marketplace platform specializing in Learning Chinese. We have mostly been B2C, so people can check out tutors and book sessions with them.

However, we are looking to also do B2B. What sort of businesses do you feel might actually need that? This is either as part of optional employee development or as part of business needs. Do you have any ideas in mind?

I used to dread having to memorize so many classifiers but I've found that it's not that bad.

I have exam on 7 nov, paper based, this is last tine with 2.0 i want to pass to get my degree

Can someone share some tips?

I know 1 to 460 vocab, out of 600,

I nvr wrote any chinese chracter, just recognize and practiced

Your help will be appreciated

Thank you

For me it is 一杯珍珠奶茶 🧋HAHHA

In my opinion, this is the kind of thing AI should be used for. There's a few variants of 《过来人》 now, with various people from history rapping in Chinese about their lives.

这些事
我也一件一件经历过
我是过来人
一千年前揣着跟你一样的心
你熬的夜 你咽的话
你没赢的仗
我都有份
我不是来教你
我是来陪你走这一程
你不是一个人
前面有我留了灯

Oh, the full lyrics are here.

There's quite a few articles about it in the news, e.g.:

“我是过来人，一千年前揣着跟你一样的心……”近日，AI说唱歌曲《过来人》在社交平台刷屏。杜甫、苏轼、刘邦等十位古人轮番开麦，以普通人的口吻唱出各自人生里的困顿，引发众多网友共鸣。截至发稿前，该作品抖音播放量已超过7500万，视频号播放量超过4500万。

Asking for recs ^.^

I saw this app that's relatively new called Merry Mandarin, and I've been using it for a few days and it seems to work. However I am concerned because a lot of the english in the apps seems to be ai-generated. They don't tell you what is ai and what isn't and I'm afraid that if they generate chinese w/ai then I could be learning wrong and building bad habits. Does anybody know of this app and if it's trustworthy or not?

Hi everyone,

I'm considering going to Shanghai for a language course at Shanghai International Studies University, and I'd love to hear from anyone who has done their Chinese language program.

I want to do the Spring Semster.

I have a couple of questions because I can barely find anything online about people's experiences.

1. For anybody who has done the course, how is it? How were the teachers and the classes?

2. How is the dorm? I'm planning to apply for it since its easier to make friendships this way. If anybody stayed there were the rooms okay? Is there a curfew?

1. What age are the people attending? I'm in my early twenties and I would hope I can find people to form a friend group.

4. Does SISU organise any activities, excursions or cultural experiences? Or is it mainly classes, with everyone doing their own thing afterwards?

5. How did you enjoy staying in Shanghai? Is it a good destination to travel to and stay for couple of months?

Thank you so much for reading and I'll be grateful for any advice you can give me. If anybody has a different university or language school they recommend, I'll also be grateful! :)

I looked up 學 in Pleco after seeing it in the Integrated Chinese 1-1 workbook. I thought this workbook was simplified only, so was surprised to see multiple variants of this character.

So my very dumb question about Pleco is:

Does the top line of the screenshot show the simplified character, followed by the traditional in parentheses?

I am just not into learning hsk materials. Feels like I am learning words that I will never use on everyday speech. So I am kinda stuck.

Then this idea came to my mind. Would it be ok to learn this way and can I still be intermediate level with this method?

I am currently learning them and try to use them in a sentence. So I try to learn them in a context.

What do you guys think?

I contacted mods a few days ago for permission to self-promote and haven't gotten a response so I'll just go for it. Apologies to anyone offended, but I think this is a great resource for Chinese learners.

I recently launched Yayu on iOS (Android launching in a couple weeks due to testing requirements) which is a low-key daily chinese vocab app.

You can choose your HSK level (1-9), see definitions in english, german, french, or japanese, study cantonese pronunciations (this update will be live in a day or two), and see the characters in a few beautiful faces (traditional, simplified, cursive, and seal!). It has widgets, and Duo/iPad support coming in a day or two as well.

Would appreciate any feedback or feature requests. I've wanted an app like this for many years so I figured I'd build it.

Hello! I am looking for something to work on my handwriting on real, actual paper. I think maybe I'd like to start with some characters to trace maybe? Is there anything like that?

I've been looking for the one with the blue bird logo, but I couldn't find it 😭😭

I am a 3rd year UG student from England studying the Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto (Liang Zhu), with a focus on the Westernisation of its existence through a decolonisation lens. In an attempt to be as accurate in my research as possible, I would like to use more Chinese language articles in my dissertation, but I don't know where to find them. Does anyone know any good places to start? Specifically of the nature of opinion pieces, finding people's actual opinions on both this concerto and Chinese traditional music and Western classical music, as opposed to an objective academic study.

I'd love to see a monthly “Show & Tell” thread where members could share FREE resources they've created, whether it's learning tools, YouTube videos, flashcards, FREE websites, or anything else that might help fellow learners.

I'm sure there are some fantastic resources we're missing simply because people are afraid of being accused of self-promotion or having their posts removed. I have had posts removed and it is humiliating when your heart is in the right place.

I understand the need to prevent spam, but shouldn't we encourage people who genuinely want to contribute something useful?

A dedicated monthly thread, with clear guidelines and no sales pitches, seems like a great middle ground.

Would anyone else welcome something like this? Or is something like this already here and I missed it?

Have you ever felt like native mandarin speakers pronounce the 3^rd tone completely differently from what you learned in textbooks? 🤔

I put together a 4-part series explaining the '7 tones' concept to solve this exact problem. Here is Part 1.

Would love to hear your thoughts!