When most people try to improve their Mandarin, they focus on willpower.
“I just need to be more disciplined.”
“I need better motivation.”
“I need to try harder.”
But in my experience and the experience of my students, the best way to learn Mandarin and the real breakthrough came when I stopped trying to just increase motivation, and started reducing friction.
Let me tell you this, the best way to learn Mandarin for you is the one with the least friction.
Let me explain with my set of dumbbells.
The Dumbbell Experiment: Removing Hidden Resistance
For years, I tried to go to the gym consistently. On paper, it sounded simple:
- Walk to the gym (or get the bus)
- Decide what exercises to do
- Wait for equipment
- Do the workout
- Walk home
None of this is hard. But each step adds friction.
Even small things create resistance:
- “Do I really want to walk 15 minutes in the rain?”
- “Is it going to be crowded?”
- “What should I train today?”
- “Where am I going to get changed into my gym clothes?”
Again, navigating these problems isn’t difficult. But combined they make a simple decision of should I go to the gym today, into a complex exercise where before I even reach the gym I need to ‘jump through multiple hoops’ and make a ton of tiny decisions.
Each of these small things taken alone as easy to resolve and overcome with willpower. But, taken together, they create a hefty amount of resistance that might be enough to put me off going to the gym that day entirely, even if I’m motivated.
Eventually, I bought a set of dumbbells and started working out in my lounge instead first thing in the morning.
Game changer.
Now:
- No commute
- No decision fatigue about exercises
- No waiting
- Just press play on a follow-along video and get working out
The result? I started working out consistently six times a week instead of three or four.
Is this method of working out the most optimal for muscle growth? No.
But it is the best for my health, because I’m able to stick to it and do it consistenly.
Why did I become more consistent?
Not because I became more disciplined.
But because I removed friction.
The Best Way to Learn Mandarin Consistently
Mandarin learners often design systems that rely on constant decisions:
- What should I study today?
- Which podcast should I listen to?
- Which video is at my level?
- Should I review flashcards or learn new words?
- Is this resource good enough?
- How should I allocate my time?
- Should I use free resources or paid resources?
- Should I try this new app that promises to solve all my Mandarin learning problems?
Each decision is tiny, but together they create resistance. Just like they did with me going to the gym.
And resistance kills consistency.
You don’t quit because Mandarin is hard.
You quit because starting feels slightly inconvenient.
That’s why the best way to learn Mandarin is a method that reduces friction and the feeling of inconvenience as much as possible.
My “Zero-Friction” Mandarin Setup (The Best Way To Learn Mandarin)
Instead of trying to optimise for perfection, I optimise for ease.
This is what will help you design the best way to learn Mandarin for you personally.
Download Podcasts in Advance
I batch-download Mandarin podcasts onto my phone and subscribe to a ton of Mandarin podcasts so that they are on auto-download.
This means:
- No searching.
- No deciding.
- No “what should I listen to?”
I open my phone and press play every morning on my commute.
That’s it.
The easier it is to start, the easier it’ll be to actually stick to.
Create a “Watch Later” Goldmine
On YouTube, I aggressively add cool Mandarin videos to my “Watch Later” list.
When I sit down to relax, I don’t search things in Mandarin or scroll randomly until I hopefully find something I think will be worth watching and be interesting.
I just open the list.
No thinking required.
It’s the equivalent of leaving dumbbells on the floor in your lounge, visible, ready, impossible to ignore.
Eliminate Material Anxiety
A hidden friction point in language learning is worrying whether the material is “good enough.”
Is this too easy?
Too hard?
Too slang-heavy?
Too boring? Too accented?
When you remove the constant evaluation process, you remove mental strain.
Input is input.
Press play and if it’s not right for you, worse case swap to something else on your watch later list or in your pre-downloaded podcast bank.
The most important thing is to start, not to overthink everything.
Doing and adapting = the best way to learn Mandarin
Overthinking and not actually doing anything = the worst way to learn Mandarin
Let me give you an example…
I recently met an awesome student who came to me with an incredibly detailed and well thought out plan of how to learn Mandarin effectively. But it was complicated, full of multiple steps and he admitted he spent 2 weeks working on this plan without studying as much Mandarin as he’d liked whilst working on the plan.
Don’t get obsessed with finding ‘perfect input’ or the ‘perfect method or plan’. Instead reduce the friction, stop thinking and start doing.
Eliminate all friction in the flashcard creation process
In the past I used to spend a lot of time making Mandarin flashcards, it helped loads and I was very motivated to do so. I thoroughly recommend you use Anki flashcards too!
But I’ll be honest with you, recently life has been getting the better of me. The pressure to get real results in my PhD has been steadily building over the last year. I’ve got more students to look after in the lab. I’m helping as many Mandarin learners as I can, maintaining this blog, my email newsletter and my YouTube channel.
So I simply can’t face sitting down to a list of new words I wrote down from podcasts, generating sentences from AI again and again until they sound natural and would actually be used in a conversation. Then going and copying and pasting these into anki and making cloze deletions.
It’s a long and tedious process.
So instead I just switched to language reactor instead. It literally helps me generate decent cloze deletion flashcards in a click of a button directly from YouTube videos. I often have to edit them slightly in Anki, but in all honesty it’s saving me hours.
Now believe it or not, I’m not sponsored by language reactor, I’m just recommending their platform to no benefit of my own because I genuinely think it’s good.
Don’t get me wrong it has some problems; I can’t seem to remove the pinyin from the front of the flashcards (I don’t need it nor want it to be there), sometimes the whole sentence isn’t included in flashcard, it can be cut off. But for the time saved on making the cards myself from the same content it’s worth it.
Now I can use the time that I spent keyboard crunching and arguing with AI to make flashcards on enjoying the language more.
The ‘flashcard friction’ trap is exactly why I provide all my Chunking Chinese students with anki decks with native audio for each lesson they do. As I know that if I made my students make the flashcards themselves the friction there would stop many of them in their tracks.
I’m not saying you have to do the same as me, but I think this serves as a great example to demonstrate the power of removing friction from each and every aspect of your learning routine.
Why This Works (Psychologically)
Friction compounds.
Every extra step increases the likelihood that your brain says:
“Eh… maybe tomorrow.”
But when the path is smooth:
- No decisions
- No preparation
- No logistics
- No planning
You build momentum.
And momentum is addictive.
The reason I ended up working out six times a week wasn’t because the workouts were better or I because I was more motivated to work out.
It was because starting was easier.
The same is true for Mandarin.
The Real Goal: Lower the Activation Energy
If activation energy is high, you need motivation.
If activation energy is low, you need almost nothing.
So instead of asking:
“How can I be more motivated to learn Mandarin?” or “How can I be more disciplined?”
Ask:
“How can I make it ridiculously easy to start?”
And then:
“How can I make everything I do to learn Mandarin have literally zero friction?”
Finding a way of answering these two questions is how you go from being inconsistent to learning Mandarin for hours a day without even realising.
And with time you’ll have found a personalised approach, that for you, is the best way to learn Mandarin.
Practical Ways to Reduce Mandarin Friction
- Pre-download 10+ podcast episodes.
- Keep a permanent “Watch Later” queue ready in YouTube.
- Keep flashcards open in a pinned tab.
- Consider automating flashcard generation as much as possible.
- Leave your headphones somewhere visible.
- Set a default activity (e.g., “When I cook, I always listen to Mandarin.”)
Design your environment so that Mandarin learning happens automatically.
Consistency > Intensity (The Best Way To Learn Mandarin)
The gym didn’t change.
The exercises didn’t change.
My identity didn’t change.
The friction changed.
And that changed everything.
If you want to improve your Mandarin, don’t overhaul your goals or ‘become more disciplined’.
Just make it easier to press play.
Reduce friction, increase frequency and let consistency do the rest of the work for you.
Ready to Remove the Friction?
If you’ve realised that the real problem isn’t motivation, it’s friction, then here’s the good news:
You don’t have to figure this out alone, I’m here to help.
I’ve built a step-by-step Mandarin programme designed to remove the thinking, the guessing, and the constant “what should I do next?” decisions.
No scrambling for resources.
No overcomplicating your study plan.
No wasting energy choosing materials.
Everything is laid out clearly, in order, so you can just show up and press play, the same way I did with those dumbbells in my lounge.
If you want a Mandarin system that makes consistency feel natural instead of forced, check it out here.
Reduce the friction. Increase the frequency. Let’s make Mandarin stick.
Let’s find the best way to learn Mandarin personalized to you, your goals and your life together.