this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2025
58 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
49728 readers
311 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
As far as I know, the current best practice for language learning is called Krashen’s Hypothesis or Comprehensible Input. Basically, we can learn a language best by hearing words that are slightly more complicated than what we already know. I am learning Korean and there is a nice YouTube channel where a guy makes videos of himself playing games and he talks about what’s on the screen at different levels of complexity. You could look for something like that in the language you want to learn.
CI is the correct answer. The ppl at dreamingspanish have a great breakdown of why it works. Chinese is a bit tougher because its much harder to find CI content, especially for beginner, but I've made faster progress in both spanish and chinese than I have with any other method.
I tried all the other methods people suggested below for years (flash cards, audio courses, reading); none of them worked. You might memorize words, but you won't actually be able to understand someone speaking to you. I have a friend who has a duolingo 3+ years streak (meaning she uses it every day), and still can't understand a native speaker talking at a beginner level. If she'd have spent even 1% of that time doing comprehensible input she'd be much further along.
do you have any you can recommend for chinese?
Lazychinese is really the only good channel / site that I've found. But it needs a lot more content, especially at the beginner levels. I'm having trouble making the jump from beginner to intermediate, because there isn't enough content there yet.
There's a YT channel called comprehensible mandarin that has a lot of content, but unfortunately none of it is organized by difficulty, which makes it impossible to use. You should really be understanding like 90% of the content, and if you can't, you should bump down to a lower difficulty.
If anyone has any other good recs, I'd also like to know.