2026-04-17 83 ¶
Week 5: First fully comprehensible video
Blabla Chinese's Father and Son series is probably the most language-dense thing I've found at the superbeginner level. Even when first starting out, it was easily comprehensible via Amber's excellent use of visual aid, but none of the comprehension came from her words. Today was different, though. Long passages such as "whose hair is this? Is it my hair? No. Is it Lady Gaga's hair? No. It's Father's hair." I could fully understand just through audio alone. Last week I was picking out just the most common sentences, but this time I understood a full ~6 minute video at the superbeginner level.
Anything beyond a very simple, visually-aided video, though, is still completely out of reach. The Mandarin Click newcomer videos, while slow and simple, are still tough to fully comprehend, since I can't discern much from the pictures. The Story learning with Annie spot the difference series, aside from where she points at specific things in the image, are almost completely incomprehensible. I can only pick out a word here or there.
I'm also keeping up weekly crosstalk with my coworkers to mixed success. I still need to figure out a good way to do this over video call, where we're missing the speed, accuracy, and fun of pen and paper. We've covered some simple topics like where we're from, pets we've owned, and our family structure, so maybe I'll try out easy games like "spot the difference" next.
2026-04-09 71 ¶
Week 4: One month down
Anybody who's worked on learning a second language, be it through CI methods or not, knows that feeling prior to acquisition where there's a delay between hearing something like like "I'm going to drink this water" and actually comprehending the message through visual assistance. I think it was yesterday or today that I could encounter this sentence from Blabla Chinese and understand with very little delay that Amber was about to take a sip of water.
This is pretty different from "knowing" what a sentence means after hearing it. This second category is actually getting noticeably broader by the day for me. There are lots of sentences that with CI visuals I recognize as long as it sticks to simple nouns, verbs, and adjectives, but there's a lag between sound and meaning. If I had to guess, I'm probably about 100 hours away from all the content marked as "beginner" being comprehensible via audio only. The only content I can use as audio-only right now are the baby immersion videos by You Can Chinese, which is about as exciting as standing in an windowless room for an hour holding your thumb in a glass of lukewarm water. But it's comprehensible! That's progress.
2026-03-28 63 ¶
Week 3: Panda faces everywhere
I'm talking about these. They freak me out and they are in so many videos. At this point I've reviewed about 15 YouTube channels from the ALG Level 1 list, and I'm settling into three main contributors.
- Lazy Chinese
- Linguaflow
- (Recent) Blabla Chinese
Older Blabla Chinese videos have a lot of the seizure-inducing flashing visuals and text, so I've been sticking to premium videos posted in last 6 months or so. Linguaflow has long-form let's plays that are easy to set-and-forget when I have time to sit and watch for a while.
Of everything, though, Lazy Chinese is the most ALG-friendly with enough content to get a good number of hours under my belt. The website is constantly getting upgraded, although it's not at the CIJ or Dreaming level yet. What I like here is the focus on ALG basics: pantomime, images, stories. Also the (mostly) lack of AI imagery and flashing or disturbing materials means it's easier for me to focus on the what's being spoken. Some of the earlier beginner/super-beginner videos used AI for visual aids, but the AI usage seems to have worn off recently.
2026-03-22 50 ¶
Week 2: Setting a daily hour goal
The rhythm of Mandarin is becoming familiar and common words are easy to predict, although what I can actively recall is still extremely small. If you asked me to produce "green t-shirt", or "this man is standing" I'm confident I could sound it out in my head, but physically producing the sounds with accuracy would be impossible. I also am completely unaware of any grammatical nuance between simple sentences that can look outwardly the same. In English, for example, I can tell there's a difference between "a man stands" and "this man is standing." I have no idea whether this kind of distinction will show up in Mandarin yet.
Lately I've spent a lot of time assessing how much progress I can realistically make over the next year. I will be traveling to Japan in about 9 months and I want to bring Japanese from the ~1500 hours I currently hold to as close to that 3000 (Dreaming Spanish level 7) mark as I can prior to arriving in Tokyo. I don't want Mandarin to fall by the side either, though.
So how many hours does it take to progress at a decent clip using the ALG approach? At what point does dedicating more hours in a day not matter? I drafted up a little table based on page 2 of the Dreaming Spanish roadmap to answer these questions for myself.
| Level | Hours needed | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | 300 | 10 mo, 0 days | 5 mo, 0 days | 3 mo, 10 days | 2 mo, 15 days | 2 mo, 0 days | 1 mo, 20 days |
| 4 | 600 | 1 yr, 7 mo, 25 days | 10 mo, 0 days | 6 mo, 20 days | 5 mo, 0 days | 4 mo, 0 days | 3 mo, 10 days |
| 5 | 1200 | 3 yr, 3 mo, 15 days | 1 yr, 7 mo, 25 days | 1 yr, 1 mo, 5 days | 10 mo, 0 days | 8 mo, 0 days | 6 mo, 20 days |
| 6 | 2000 | 5 yr, 5 mo, 25 days | 2 yr, 9 mo, 0 days | 1 yr, 10 mo, 2 days | 1 yr, 4 mo, 15 days | 1 yr, 1 mo, 5 days | 11 mo, 3 days |
| 7 | 3000 | 8 yr, 2 mo, 20 days | 4 yr, 1 mo, 10 days | 2 yr, 9 mo, 0 days | 2 yr, 20 days | 1 yr, 7 mo, 25 days | 1 yr, 4 mo, 15 days |
The two important milestones are low fluency at level 6 (2000 hours), and high fluency at level 7(3000 hours).
As a native English speaker, that sweet spot for a language like Mandarin seems to be somewhere around the 3 hour mark. At one hour per day it takes over 8 years to fluency. Much too slow for me. Go up to 2 hours per day and we shave a full four years off the ETA. Just one more hour above that and we finish in around 2.75 years.
It's beyond 4 hours where I'm not sure it becomes worth it. For those with hard deadlines and plenty of free time, getting to level 7 in around a year might look appealing. I'm pursuing this as a hobby, though, so I really just need to balance my interest level against results. If I'm looking to create a daily habit where the finish line is more than a year off anyway, how different is 2.1 years vs 1.6 years really? Moreover, the time to low fluency (level 6) is almost identical, so sitting somewhere in the 2.5-3.5 hour range seems ideal to me.
For now, if I stick with one hour per day of Mandarin, I would just cross the threshold for level 3 (300 hours) at the start of December. Once I'm back from Japan in mid December, I plan to ramp up the Mandarin to match this ~3 hours/day goal. Until then, check out the Japanese page for regular updates on my journey from low functional proficiency to (hopefully) near-native fluency!
2026-03-15 37 ¶
Week 1: Watching Grass Grow
It's easy to forget how difficult this step is. I used to think it was pointless for people to post updates to Reddit and Discord at low hour counts, but the opportunity cost at these early audiovisual stages is painfully apparent. I still have 2963 hours to go, meaning I'm less than 2% of the way there, yet in these 37 hours I could have done any one of:
- Read 6 books in English
- Finish the main story and side quests in Hades 2
- Watched 10-15 movies
- Finished Death Note
Still, in this amount of time with absolute beginner content in Mandarin, only the very most frequent words in simple sentences feel familiar when paired with visual aid.
"This shirt is blue." "He is sitting." "There are birds."
Few, if any, Mandarin words are in my active recall yet. I found this phenomenon of recognizing sound but not being able to recall it incredibly distressing in the early phases of Japanese. Now I realize that's just the normal progression of acquiring words.
- Noticing
- Recognizing
- Automatic, correct usage with context and reminder
- Active recall without context
Finding high quality content at the super beginner stage has been difficult, to say the least. Very few creators come close to what Yuki at CI Japanese can do with static visuals, drawings, and pantomime. Content that really sticks to the ALG style of clear messages delivered via good audiovisual quality seems to be limited to the last 6 months or so. Prior to this, the field is just littered with videos that use visual aids ranging between distracting and outright disturbing, echoing or poorly recorded audio, and even lack of skill with presentation and markup. Despite all this, though, I'm incredibly grateful that so many people have put the effort into making this niche method of learning Mandarin possible.
Based on YouTube upload timestamps, the bar for beginner CI content has been rising rapidly over the last few months. By far the best channel I've found is Stickynote Chinese. Jun is a textbook example of storytelling via setting, props, and body language. The video and audio quality are excellent, the stories are relatable, and I find staying engaged with her videos effortless. The only issue here is that it's a pretty new channel, so there's not a ton of content yet. I'm eagerly awaiting more.
Until then, a new website called Lengualytics is proving invaluable for hour tracking and finding level-appropriate content. It's still looking pretty beta-ey, but for anyone willing to overlook that I think it's a fantastic resource.
2026-03-09 4 ¶
Day 1!
Today is just exploring the different CI channels on the Mandarin input super sheet from the MandarinALG subreddit.
2026-03-08 0 ¶
Why did I choose to learn Mandarin?
After putting roughly two years and two thousand hours into learning Japanese, I'd like to give Mandarin a try (shocking, I know). There are plenty of stories, opinions, and advice for people who want to take a massive-input approach to Japanese, but I'm not sure I can say the same for Mandarin. Moreover, I took a hybrid approach with Japanese; I study bilingual Anki cards every day and occasionally reference a textbook for grammar points.
For Japanese, my primary motivation was simply a better understanding of media I consume on a daily basis, and, if possible, consuming it entirely in its native language. I don't have any native speakers at my disposal aside from iTalki, and while trips to Japan are nice, they aren't a luxury I can afford regularly enough to say that fluency in speaking would give me a good return on the time invested. If I can keep consuming books, games, and TV in Japanese, then I've hit my goal.
Chinese is a different beast, though. At work, I have more than eighteen native speakers among my coworkers, representing many different regions of China. I want to speak their language with them, even if it's just a limited subset of a standard dialect. As much as possible, I want a better appreciation for the varied cultures they represent without going through an English translation. With that in mind, I'm planning to take an augmented ALG approach to Chinese.
A 2025 survey brought the effectiveness of methods that rely solely on CI into question. Nguyen and Doan argue that an ecology that affords "negotiating meaning" in an individualized way fosters the greatest second language growth. They go on to recommend students play an active role engaging with their second language rather than simply being a vessel for passive intake. In particular, they point to the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT for systems that can adjust their language level and provide immediate feedback at precisely the level an individual learner requires.
My method with Chinese will probably be mostly CI, much like I did for Japanese, but delaying SRS use until it's needed specifically for memorizing Hanzi, and limiting its use mainly to proper nouns. I'm also planning to utilize Crosstalk from day one, since it provides exactly the type of "neuro-ecology" Nguyen et al. describe.
I regret not writing about my comprehension levels as I traveled through the stages of acquiring Japanese. Of course I remember there was a "complete gibberish" stage of Japanese, but it's not really until I was getting help planning a trip to Kyoto with a native speaker in Japanese that I thought to reflect on my progress. So I'll be using this site to keep myself accountable and as a living record for my approach to ALG in a post-LLM world.