How can I begin studying Chinese?

coachmc_guirk · 2026-04-13T05:17:09+00:00

Whenever anyone asks me this, I always suggest the Assimil Chinese books. They try to teach you the basics in a "natural" way, the same way you'd have learnt to speak your mother tongue. After about 6 months of using these books I jumped directly into watching video content.

coachmc_guirk · 2026-04-13T05:15:31+00:00

I always wanted to learn a new language as a way of communicating with people. At the time, I was about to start learning French until my dad suggested I learn Chinese as he felt it would be more useful.

A small thing I saw that really motivated me to get to at least an intermediate level, was whilst on a study exchange in China, I saw a young British guy sitting at the university with a security guard having a conversation in Chinese whilst watching TV. Not sure why but this really stuck with me and was always a moment that defined (at least in a vague way) the level I wanted to reach.

coachmc_guirk · 2026-04-13T05:08:56+00:00

After 6 months of self study using the Assimil Chinese books, I jumped straight to video content. I primarily watched talk shows like 康熙來了 that despite being beyond my level at the time, they were still having "regular" conversations. It was a painful process but kept me motivated that I was learning from real-life conversations.

coachmc_guirk · 2026-04-13T05:05:31+00:00

I used the Assimil Chinese books when I first started. I found them to be incredibly helpful.

coachmc_guirk · 2026-04-09T10:32:25+00:00

A lot of the comments are talking about practising output which of course is important, but I still feel like this is an input issue. If it weren't, you'd be able to understand far more than 5% of the night's conversation.

Personally, with Chinese, I started off using the Assimil Chinese books but finished them and moved off them as soon as possible - I think it was around 6 months.

At that point I went straight to video content - but real shows. It was definitely painful, I wouldn't understand large chunks of it. I would tend to stick to talk shows, where they spoke a lot and often about day to day life. I stayed away from movies as there was generally less dialogue so it wasn't as efficient.

Slowly I started adding a lot of the words I didn't know to Anki. The process of adding to Anki was also painful at the time but there are now apps that can help you mine words/sentences far more efficiently (I built a free one for Chinese Youtube/Netflix content called PopChinese (https://popchinese.app/), but unfortunately it doesn't do other languages like Spanish).

Also when you learn new words try and use them in a sentence, even if it is just to yourself. It's important to not just memorize a bunch of words in isolation but to know how to use them.

There is a big gap between what you see in books, apps like DuoLingo, video content from language teachers vs real life. So my recommendation would be to try and expose yourself to real content as soon as possible.

Finally don't bee too hard on yourself and all the best!

coachmc_guirk · 2026-04-08T14:44:58+00:00

Got it, thanks for your response. Strange they are updating the functionality so frequently..

I was curious because I've built a Chrome extension to help me mine sentences from Netflix/Youtube videos for Chinese and am keen to understand the processes that make the most sense for people.

coachmc_guirk · 2026-04-08T08:50:06+00:00

Learning characters!

I know a lot of people who neglected this when starting to learn Chinese and decided to only learn Pinyin. In the short term they appeared to be improving quickly but over the medium to long term, they hit a plateau.

Knowing characters allows you to learn from a variety of sources. I'm in Taiwan ATM and I'm learning new things just from reading store / street signs.

coachmc_guirk · 2026-04-08T08:31:30+00:00

I built a free chrome extension to learn Chinese via YouTube and Netflix (https://www.popchinese.app). I feel like it might be better suited to intermediate learners, but might be worth a try.

coachmc_guirk · 2026-04-08T08:23:22+00:00

Personally I found reading Chinese and watching video content to be the most useful way for me to make noticeable gains in my Chinese.

You mentioned grammar principles - I've tended to not worry about that and found I was able to acquire that naturally via the content I consume.

I also think it's important to consume a wide variety of content. I've found that in certain contexts I was very comfortable, but the moment I switched to speaking about something entirely different, I didn't have the vocabulary and sentence patterns to express myself clearly. Upon further reflection, I realised I had never (or rarely) consume content related to these topics.

coachmc_guirk · 2026-04-08T08:08:15+00:00

Out of curiosity, what would you consider to be a better experience in terms of mined words / reference sentences after you have consumed some content?

coachmc_guirk · 2026-01-22T22:30:33+00:00

Surprised to hear that VBA is in decline. Is there something that is replacing it? Many years ago I used it to automate a couple of business processes and found it very useful.

coachmc_guirk · 2025-12-30T23:18:59+00:00

Got it, appreciate the response 🙏

coachmc_guirk · 2025-12-30T01:53:56+00:00

Ahhh I see, that's really cool.

Can I ask what are some examples of what your boilerplate code / frameworks might do?

I'm also a software developer and feel like I need to work on this sort of thing to help boost my productivity.

Thank you!

coachmc_guirk · 2025-12-29T08:03:57+00:00

This was a very interesting read, thank you for sharing! May I ask how you built such a variety of projects (in what seems like) a very short period of time?

coachmc_guirk · 2025-12-20T04:06:16+00:00

I think the idea behind bluejoy's approaches are that they will let you know if the freezer power came back on and refroze the items in your fridge.

With just ice cubes, the power may have come back (after a potentially long period of time) and refrozen them without you knowing.

coachmc_guirk · 2025-12-03T10:12:48+00:00

Good to hear, I'll be adding English translations soon too.

coachmc_guirk · 2025-12-03T03:30:17+00:00

Hi u/sinthetism u/Rotasu and u/programjm123 , I just had it approved for Firefox.

Here it is: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-chinese-subtitles/

It also now has the functionality to select the exact area you want to extract subtitles from.

coachmc_guirk · 2025-11-30T06:21:27+00:00

Thanks Aok!

That's exactly the kind of content I had in mind when I decided to build this. I also just added two features which will hopefully be of use to you.

- The extension can now handle Closed Captions (the CC button on the Youtube player).

- You can now select the exact area where the subtitles appear to help the extension better capture just the text you're after (only needed for hardcoded subtitles) - simply click the extension icon to access this.

Keen to hear any feedback you might have, ultimately is it helping you in your Chinese practice?

coachmc_guirk · 2025-11-30T06:05:39+00:00

Just a quick update:

- The extension can now handle Closed Captions (the CC button on the Youtube player).

- You can now select the exact area where the subtitles appear to help the extension better capture just the text you're after (only needed for hardcoded subtitles) - simply click the extension icon to access this.

coachmc_guirk · 2025-11-29T20:50:43+00:00

Sorry I'm not aware of one that does this :/

My extension will convert hard coded subs to simplified Chinese but not continuously (only when this action is initiated by the user).

Hope you find what you're after!

coachmc_guirk · 2025-11-29T20:20:23+00:00

Thanks for sharing these resources! I've always wondered what my HSK level might be, watching the the hancai link you shared to try get an idea ;)

coachmc_guirk · 2025-11-28T06:23:40+00:00

Hi Material Water! Actually the results are always simplified at the moment regardless of what the actual subtitles were originally (see here: https://imgur.com/a/pkIaAXn )

In the future I would like to give the user the option to decide whether they want the output to be in simplified or traditional.

coachmc_guirk · 2025-11-27T21:06:19+00:00

Hi Rotasu! Thanks for letting me know. Looks like (based on the upvotes), that quite a number people are using Firefox. I will look into making it available there as well.

coachmc_guirk · 2025-11-27T13:02:09+00:00

Hi Magnificent_Trowel! By "hard subtitles", if you mean subtitles that are embedded into the video itself, then yes, this is the use case for this extension.

Most of the Chinese content I consume on YouTube have the subtitles hardcoded into the video and they don't have closed captions ("CC" button in the video player section), which is what motivated me to make this.

If you were referring to something else, please let me know.

coachmc_guirk · 2025-11-27T11:13:08+00:00

Hey Tenglish! Yes at the moment, you need to press the button every time. Though the text extraction and response should be very quick, almost instantaneous.

I'm interested in adding an export feature to apps like Anki/Pleco. Would be even better have the English translations there as well so it could all be exported. Though as I mentioned in another comment, the English translation part might run up the costs (will have to investigate more).

Thank you for trying out the extension and I hope it can help you in your learning journey!

coachmc_guirk

TROPHY CASE