Gnargnar's Study Log

gnargnar · September 6, 2026, 6:10am

Tomorrow (6/Sep/2026) marks one month on HH for me, and I’d like to take the early milestone as an opportunity to start a study log! I’ve already gotten many ideas and guidance from this forum and so I hope to give a little back and make a journal record for accountability for myself.

First off, the numbers

(For anyone unfamiliar with this site: these are unrealistic first-month numbers. Do not attempt to do things the way I am unless you have multiple hours on your hands every day, a background in both language-learning and setting up long-term habits, and an intensely lopsided interest in Mandarin literacy over listening/speaking in the near-term. Just follow the basic recommendations of everyone on here. Take it slow! Find a pace you can do on your hard days, not your easy days. You will get there if you keep showing up, and you won’t if you make it so hard you have to stop. Don’t push it.)

I’ve been experimenting with timezone manipulation (see chiahead’s study log for a breakdown). The max I managed to squeeze into a day was 92 between overloading dictionary items and stacking two 40-item queues. I had a lot of available hours to study that day as my partner was sick and we adjusted our plans to stick around the house with most errands already getting wrapped up. I don’t think it was pleasant and I don’t think it’s a good idea at any other stage of language-learning than right now when I’m scrambling to inhale early vocabulary to get on to the lowest rungs of comprehension.

I’ve also been jumping around the HSK Levels some to tailor my queue towards target characters based on what comes up in reading and listening (more below).

I live in the US. I consider myself a monolingual English speaker, with maybe A2/B1 Spanish and A1 Korean under my belt on a good day. I’ve dabbled for fun in a whole lot more languages over the years: French, Esperanto, ASL, Afrikaans, Japanese, Toki Pona. Right now if I was learning a language to use more in day-to-day interactions it would probably be Spanish, Vietnamese, Korean, or ASL as they’d all have a more clear and immediate benefit than Mandarin on my life because of where I am in the US. Heck, Cantonese would be more beneficial too!

I’ve arrived at my current interest in Mandarin because 1) I’ve wanted to be able to speak it since some of my relatives immigrated to the US from Zhuhai over 20 years ago, 2) the writing system is fascinating and exciting for me, 3) I’ve visited and/or lived in sinosphere areas before including Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Singapore, and multiple US Chinatowns, and 4) a weird series of drip-drip-drip moments across my life in the past few months where having B2+ fluency in Mandarin would mean I could dig a lot deeper into some things I’m curious about.

I want to be literate! Being able to speak and interact in Mandarin would be handy and great, but is (at least at this early point) pretty tangential. I want to be able to read sinosphere news, watch shows on bilibili, try out some webnovels, and maybe (a dream) get good enough to help translate some 剧本杀 games to English. My big, pie-in-the-sky learning goal is to read Journey to the West.

I learned about HH the way so many people seem to have: by repeatedly wondering over the years whether WaniKani-but-for-Chinese existed after bouncing off of Anki decks multiple times, and finally taking the plunge. This forum has been incredible, and has helped me pick out the other parts of my daily study.

The DuChinese app for reading/istening practice and the Pleco dictionary app are both absolutely incredible. Pleco is quite possibly the single-best dictionary interface I’ve used with any language, ever (English-English dictionaries included). DuChinese meant I could start reading in Mandarin after like a week of HH, which is a beautiful feeling given how limited my vocabulary was.

My DuChinese progress

This graph is incredibly misleading. I am barely pushing into “Elementary” readings, which seem to be HSK2-3. I am feeling much more solid in their newbie readings and have managed to reduce the number of lookups I need during an average newbie reading by quite a bit.

Beyond that I am putting in active listening input time with a bilingual book of stories I found, rewatching through the MCU with Mandarin dub+Mandarin subs, and listening to this CI video repeatedly of a man gently explaining how to interact with items in his house. This past week I’ve also found the wonders of LazyChinese podcast. I found out about two weeks ago that a library I have card with carries digital loans for almost all of the Pimsleur mandarin series of courses. So why not? I’m on Level 1 Lesson 7 and it is indeed helping me with my pronunciation and recall.

I drive a lot for work, so I have time in the car to squeeze in a fair amount of audio on most days. HH lessons+review happen if I am awake during a bout of insomnia and/or early morning. I would say I average 90-92% retention on reviews.

To help get there I also try to squeeze in extra study review throughout the day. For extra HH study I’ll pull up on my phone for a 5min break before another work task, or in line at the grocery store, etc. I try to divvy up my extra study bite-sized moments between reviewing the past 1-2 days of lessons and reviewing any recent mistakes. Sometimes all I have time for is looking at the characters/words on the main page and going through each mentally (I’ve found that the mnemonics are a great resource and work best for me when I try to learn the character on my own without it first and then start building it in if I find I’m struggling with a character).

In the evenings my partner and I like to read in bed for about 30-60min as we fall asleep. I’ve taken that time and made it my DuChinese time (except for today when I’m writing this blog). DuChinese is exceptional and I’ll happily make the same recommendation that I’ve seen other people make here in these forums: HH will teach you characters and words in isolation and DuChinese will help you practice incorporating all that HH goodness into the actual language and grammar and feeling and messiness of understanding Mandarin. They are a beautiful pairing.

It really really helps that I think this is fun and I am enjoying HH study a lot. This approach to language learning feels like a video game. There’s an incredible branching skill tree that I’m only catching glimmers of so far, and yet my capacities are already exploding. So very much more Mandarin to go between me and opening my first book towards the end of HSK4!

What does this all mean/where is my Chinese actually at after a month? I can recognize at least one character on pretty much any line of Chinese text I come across at this point. That feels really cool! That often means I still have no idea what’s actually being said, but on a basic level I am hitting the point where deciphering at least some meaning is possible, and that’s exactly the threshold I wanted to see if I could push to quickly.

Learning Mandarin no longer feels impossible or too daunting. Instead it looks like basic questions in any new practice: how can I make this sustainable for myself and my other commitments (e.g. time with my partner, friends and family, sleep, work, hygiene, exercise, etc.)? I doubt I’ll keep up my current pace because it is a heavy time commitment, but I hope I’ve laid enough of a foundation that Elementary DuChinese readings start to feel more routine by this time in October even at a slower pace.

Time to find out together! I’ll report back next month. Thanks for being such a fantastic community of language-learners; I have already gotten so much from you all.

kaysik · September 6, 2026, 11:31am

Just FYI - Journey to the West (in Easy Chinese) exists so you don’t need to wait until “on day” (they also have separate volumes and e-book version if you don’t want one giant physical book). Since the original is written in old Chinese it’s pretty tough going without lots of notes explaining stuff (it’s from 400 years ago, so basically like reading Shakespeare). So unless you’re a masochist you’re going to end up reading a modern re-telling, might as well be a beginner friendly re-telling! I’m about 25% of the way through and it’s great - very slow going but I’m now really good at reading about mountain caves so that’s cool

Now if HH could just finalise the learning form lists feature I could load up the vocab lists for each book and then power though.

gnargnar · September 6, 2026, 1:05pm

Ah lovely, what a clever project! And yes, reading the old archaic form of it is what makes that a pie-in-the-sky vision of ultra-literacy. This looks like a great (and much earlier) stepping stone, thank you

phil · September 7, 2026, 6:15am

One thing that would be interesting is finding easy-wins on adding more “gamified” elements. Prior feedback about the ranking system, or having some confetti on leveling up… though whenever I look through successful games, usually there’s some sort of “shop system” or “unlock” of some sort

Overall your current routine sounds very solid! I’m surprised you’re able to read Chinese before bed; sometimes it can be taxing looking forward to hearing the next month update, with however you end up adjusting your pace

gnargnar · September 7, 2026, 12:56pm

The core ‘game’/progression loop here is doing a daily random outcome (how well you remember X items) with not-guaranteed success (typical SRS aims for 80-90% retention, not 100%). That’s a basic operant conditioning setup! It’s not too dissimilar from what’s used to coax people into social media addiction, gambling, staying on dating apps, keeping a Duolingo streak, and definitely in games. It doesn’t have to be insidious, but a Skinner box is a Skinner box.

Here, I appreciate how you’ve made an intuitive progression system clear. Those daily random outcomes get tied in to individual item leveling (e.g. “I am an Apprentice in Popeye”) and contribute to an arbitrary overall leveling. The secret kick you’ve got here that I don’t think is quite true of any other language-learning is learning 汉字 means learning more unlocks more. By knowing more characters I can know more words, and by knowing more words I can have more that I can connect new characters to when I learn them. This isn’t true of any alphabet-based writing system. I don’t keep unlocking more letters the more English vocabulary I learn. 汉字 represent a unique branching skill tree!

I don’t know that a shop system would have all that much appeal to me personally. I think something straightforward with gamification beyond the tracking and leveling you do have would be unlocking some ability to display a character or a word in the forum as your ‘favorite’ somehow. You could unlock the ability to display an item at, say, Journeyman I. It’d give it a little bit of friction to get there, an extra motivation early on but in the grand scheme of things fairly trivial. You would probably need to be selective with what you allow through for someone to favorite (e.g. blacklisting 自杀 or anything derogatory) but I think that would be a simple cosmetic system that would use your extant daily loop + leveling + branching unlock systems well.

phil · September 9, 2026, 10:22pm

I ended up looking into what Discourse offers other than the current “flair” we have set up for the ranks. There doesn’t seem to be many other options, but perhaps a plugin exists… I think another route is looking into custom badges as “achievements” linked back to the app

I think you have a point that the current unlocking is already quite gamified. Maybe the focus could be “showcasing” it more somehow, like as an actual unlock tree for example e.g. Path of Exile

gnargnar · September 13, 2026, 4:45pm

Wanted to celebrate an unexpected win from yesterday. A couple months ago a friend got a mahjong set and has started hosting mahjong nights at her place. I remember attending the first night and fumbling through the tiles, trying to keep track of characters with a cheat sheet next to me.

Lo and behold, when I sat down last night so many more of the characters were clear I could distinguish not only 一 through 九 on the 万 tiles, but I could also tell apart the 东南西北 tiles too! Mahjong becomes a lot easier to get into a flow with when I’m not interrupting my thought process to try and remember a visual shape I’m unfamiliar with.

gnargnar · October 6, 2026, 7:53am

今天我已经学习了普通话两月；自己现在是我爱好。我日日听见播客，做练习的说话。因为把手机读所以我可以学习到汉字新。因为把汉字新学习到所以越来越读书的手机。谢谢HH！

Two months in and I can write! This has been an exciting language-learning journey so far, and it’s progressed more dramatically than any other I have experienced. I think that great progress is due to a mix of things. On the personal front there’s my available time (cumulatively Chinese study is occupying multiple hours of my day currently) and my prior experience with languages (it’s just easier to be a beginner language learner when you’ve already been one before).

Outside of those individual quirks though, I think the actual thing that is most contributing to how quickly I’m progressing is the quality of study resources available! I’m able to blend my use of HH with DuChinese with CI media (picked up the first volume of the Easy Chinese Journey to the West, thank you @kaysik!) with Pimsleur audio drills (Level 1 Lesson 23) with more passive media consumption of pop songs, BiliBili videos, and movies (the MCU rewatch continues). They all come together as one big reinforcing web of activities that help everything feel varied and fresh, rather than like juggling too many plates.

I don’t worry about whether I’m missing a day in any particular activity besides here with HH, as SRS (and my memory) thrives best on that cadence. But having so many other choices of what to go towards is helping me anticipate and stay away from burnout. These are almost all digital tools and/or strategic approaches to language learning that I simply didn’t know about, say, in the mid-2000s when I spent a couple months on an Esperanto forum. I am grateful for where self-paced language learning has come to in the 2020s.

It also helps that I’ve hit the tipping point with graded readers where reading is varied and fun. I’m reading about reincarnated dogs, interracial (and international) romance, and cell phones that are trying to take over the world. I’ve even learned about common Chinese cultural touchstones like the Peach Tree Colony as a figurative utopia and I’ve gained more insight into the Chinese festival calendar. When I’m reading now it’s often because I want to find out what happens next, and then HH is right there to help me do the slow and steady work of guiding any new vocab I gain into my long-term memory.

On a typical day I’ve landed on a 15+5 blend with the default word limit of 10. This means that each day I normally have 3-5 new characters (depending on number of new components), 8-10 new words, and 5 new dictionary words. I am making extensive use of the dictionary and priority queuing still as I chase the thousand most common words (with many enjoyable detours). I sometimes adjust my timezone to get ahead a little on the next day’s reviews, especially on the weekend when I have a very different routine and commitments. SRS works on such a long timescale after a few item levels that I am not concerned about any ‘harm’ reviewing ahead by 12 hours is doing to my learning progress.

HSK is mostly a curiosity for me personally but I’ve found that it’s a curricular structure that I more or less have to navigate given how I’ve decided to study Mandarin. At this current moment in late 2026 there are so many current online materials for beginners that are built for outdated versions of the HSK. As a result, it’s often a gamble for me whether something that is ‘graded’ appropriately for what I’m looking for will actually have the sweet spot of familiar-to-unfamiliar characters and vocabulary that make comprehension and learning thrive together. That said, there is always more to learn from material that’s ‘lower-level’ than me. I’m reading at 2 to 3 usually now, but I’m definitely finding HSK1 graded material still relevant to practice comprehension speed with (in both reading and listening). From my DuChinese stats:

Basically, it seems that emphasizing my reading skills so much (over listening, speaking, and writing) has meant that I am slowly filling out an HSK path anyways, as avoiding low-level vocabulary only makes things more confusing after a while. For example, if I’m trying to wrap my head around an unfamiliar sentence structure with a grammar participle I don’t know, it doesn’t help things much if I’m also trying to remember what 桃树 means or sounds like (tao2shu4, peach tree). Regardless of how ‘common’ a word is in actual day-to-day Mandarin, the HSK system makes certain words more common for me in my current day-to-day life as a novice Mandarin speaker. At some point soon I will probably learn 请假 (quing3jia4 ask for leave) whether I think it’s ‘more common’ than, say, 道歉 (dao4qian4 to apologize) because multiple stories I’ve read have used 请假 and I’ve yet to come across 道歉 at all. Of course, now that I’ve written this it’s very possible that 道歉 will be everywhere I look and listen in the coming week I’ll report back if so.

Please note: I do think that I’m trying to reflect on a different type of vocab-building challenge than the critique I’ve seen in these forums that HanziHero’s official curricular words feature some obscure words. I have seen how much my character-learning gets reinforced by learning words with each character, and I will intentionally seek out further dictionary items if needed to help me learn a character better over trying to review a mnemonic more or other recall methods.

I am enjoying this journey quite a bit. I am excited to find out what growth I have between now and my November entry. I managed to have a few brief face-to-face conversations this month in Mandarin (a cashier, a driver, a friend). I felt stiff and panicked in each and could barely keep going for only a couple of back-and-forth basic exchanges in each, an experience I imagine almost every language learner has been through. I don’t want to hold time in my week yet for a tutor or a conversation buddy as I really value how time-flexible my current approach is. My commitments to myself, my partner, my home, my work, and my friends and family all come ahead of this wonderful hobby. But it sure was tempting each time I got to speak with someone to imagine what it’s like when I’m even a little bit more comfortable in my Mandarin, when I can hold on for even just a few breaths more in a language I couldn’t speak prior to the past two months. I’ll keep on chasing that elusive next step each day for now.