The Blog

Learn Mandarin Here
Free Email Course

Tag: learn mandarin

  • The Best Way to Learn Mandarin: Reduce Friction, Increase Consistency

    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.

  • This Simple System Will Get You Fluent In Mandarin

    When I tell people I learned Mandarin to conversational fluency in just 1.5 years, they usually don’t believe me. In fact, when I started learning Mandarin I wouldn’t have believed it either.

    Just six months later, I even by some miracle became the UK National Mandarin Speaking Champion and started performing stand-up comedy in Mandarin. Albeit comedy is definitely not my strong point, you can check out my awful attempts here and here.

    Teachers were shocked. A few even asked if I’d secretly grown up with a Chinese nanny.

    (Spoiler: I didn’t. But you’ll have to wait until the end to find out the full story.)

    The truth is, I didn’t take traditional language classes. I didn’t spend hours on grammar drills or textbook grinding sessions. I used a system that I really want to share with you, one that actually worked. The cool thing is it hasn’t just worked for me, I’ve helped others implement it too… more on this later.

    And here’s the best part: I’m not a “language genius.”

    I nearly failed Spanish in school.

    So if I can learn Mandarin to conversational fluency, I believe with the right system in place, you can too. I really want help you achieve this and it’s the whole reason I founded Chunking Chinese.

    Let me show you exactly how I did it.

    Step 1: Find Your “Language Parents”

    Think about how babies learn languages, through patient parents.

    They babble, mispronounce words, and say total nonsense. Yet their parents listen, gently correct, and encourage them.

    Adults don’t usually get that luxury. But we can create it.

    Two weeks into learning Mandarin, I found my first “language parent.”

    His name was Ryan, a native speaker from school. I taught his sister maths, and in exchange, he agreed to spend one hour a day speaking Mandarin with me for four months.

    At that point, I barely knew any Mandarin. In all honesty, a month into learning Mandarin, trying to say something like “I ate porridge this morning” was an adventure to say at the least.

    I said ridiculous things. I mispronounced constantly. But Ryan stayed patient. He’d help me find the right words, correct me gently, and push me to keep going.

    Every session, I improved fast.

    It was the first time I realized how much real conversation accelerates learning.

    But it also revealed a new problem:

    After every lesson, I had a huge list of words and phrases to remember… and I forgot most of them by the next day.

    Step 2: Optimize Recall

    I tried everything, re-reading vocab lists, listening to recordings, endless repetition. Nothing stuck.

    Then I discovered the difference between recognition and recall.

    • Recognition is “I’ve seen this word before.”
    • Recall is “I can say this word and use it naturally in a sentence.”

    Most learners stop at recognition. That’s why their knowledge vanishes in real conversations.

    To fix that, I flipped my approach:

    • I started using flashcards backward the Mandarin word was on the back, not the front. Or using ‘cloze deletion’ flashcards
    • I forced myself to say each word aloud, use it in a sentence, and recall it from memory.

    But doing this once isn’t enough. You need timed repetition, that is, repetition + recall right before you forget.

    That’s when I discovered spaced repetition.

    Your memory is like a muscle: train it too often, and it’s tired; too infrequently, and it weakens. But if you review at just the right time, it gets stronger every session.

    I used Anki, an app that automatically schedules reviews when you’re about to forget.

    Suddenly, words that used to disappear in hours were sticking permanently.

    With just 30 minutes a day and 10–20 new cards, I built an active vocabulary of thousands of words.

    I also stopped memorizing single words and started learning mini-phrases, or chunks:

    Instead of memorizing “apple,” I learned “I want to eat an apple”, integrating vocabulary and sentence structure together.

    Soon, I started to think in Mandarin, not just recognize it.

    And this discovery is why I went on to build my Fluency Trainer

    But something was still missing.

    Before I tell you what that something is, I’ve got some good news for you. I created a free email course that breaks this system down step-by-step to take your Mandarin to the next level. Check it out here.

    Step 3: Immerse Yourself

    Vocabulary wasn’t the problem anymore, fluency was.

    Real fluency comes when you hear, speak, and think in the language constantly.

    So I went all in on immersion:

    • Listening to Mandarin podcasts while walking
    • Shadowing podcast hosts to copy their rhythm and tone
    • Chatting with language exchange partners
    • Narrating my day out loud in Mandarin

    At first, I understood maybe 30% of what I heard.

    But I kept going. 30% became 50%, then 75%, and eventually I could understand almost everything.

    Most people hear about immersion but do it passively, watching shows in the background or listening without focus.

    I did something different. I used 碎片时间 fragmented time/scraps of time.

    Five minutes here, ten minutes there. Short bursts of focused listening throughout the day. The effects of which snowballed and compounded without me even realising. Let me show you:

    If you can do an extra 30 minutes of listening a day that’s 274 hours over 1.5 years. An extra 60 minutes, equates to 548 hours. That’s a lot of listening practice which will bring you huge gains without much effort on your part.

    But the real game-changer came next.

    Step 4: Build Real Friendships (Active Immersion)

    Most learners stop at passive exposure, TV shows, YouTube videos and books.

    But passive input only gets you so far.

    To reach real fluency, I needed active immersion, that is, real friendships, real conversations, real mistakes.

    I started hanging out with Chinese friends and speaking only Mandarin.

    We cooked dumplings together. Celebrated Chinese festivals. Went dragon boat racing.

    Every interaction forced me to think and respond in Mandarin, without translating in my head.

    That’s the power of active immersion:

    • It pushes you to process language in real time.
    • It teaches you cultural nuance – what’s polite, what’s funny, what’s emotional.
    • It turns language into memories, not just information.

    The Truth About the “Chinese Nanny”

    No – I didn’t have a Chinese nanny.

    I grew up in a small town in the UK, and before I started learning, I hadn’t even heard a word of Mandarin.

    Fluency didn’t come from luck, talent, or childhood exposure.

    It came from following a system that anyone can use:

    1. Language Parents – Find patient speakers who’ll guide and correct you.
    2. Recall – Use spaced repetition and ‘chunking’ to truly remember.
    3. Immersion – Listen, read, and speak constantly in meaningful contexts.
    4. Friendships – Build real connections and use Mandarin in real life.

    That’s how I went from zero to conversationally fluent Mandarin in just 1.5 years.

    And you can too.

    If you want a step-by-step breakdown of my exact method, check out my free 7-day email course by clicking the button below:

    Join the course

Wait! Before You Go...

Join thousands of learners mastering Mandarin with our proven methods. Get free tips and resources delivered straight to your inbox!