Hi! I’m actually learning Chinese with LingQ too. In the language challenge, I think our Chinese team finished in a pretty respectable position, which shows that there is definitely interest in learning Chinese. It’s just that the community forum itself doesn’t seem to get much participation.
Unfortunately, I can’t do a language exchange with you because I’m not a native English speaker.
As for LingQ, I think it’s a fantastic platform overall, but the Chinese implementation has some serious issues.
The biggest one is word segmentation. Even if you carefully pre-segment your text with another tool before importing it, LingQ often breaks it apart anyway. Four-character idioms (成语) are especially affected. It frequently splits them into separate words, so when you wonder why a sentence doesn’t make sense, you eventually discover it was actually a single idiom that LingQ destroyed.
The second major problem is the pinyin. I simply don’t trust it anymore. Chinese characters often have multiple pronunciations, and LingQ seems to choose the wrong one surprisingly often—even for extremely common characters. For example, in 睡觉 (to sleep), it gets shuì right but pronounces 觉 as jué instead of jiào. There are many cases like this, and it becomes quite frustrating.
That said, LingQ has still been an important part of my learning. I’ve maintained a 1,020-day streak, and over the last few years I’ve gradually shifted most of my learning toward an AI-based workflow that I designed myself.
The core idea is simple: I don’t want to learn vocabulary in isolation. I want to learn how people actually express themselves in everyday conversation. My AI project has a long set of instructions that keeps everything focused on natural spoken Chinese, avoiding literary language and overly technical vocabulary.
It generates short texts (around 4–5 minutes), another AI checks the quality of those texts, then I use a high-quality TTS to listen to them. The most important feature is that the AI remembers what vocabulary has already appeared and keeps recycling it naturally in later texts.
Every few days I export the unknown vocabulary from my LingQ course and feed that list back into the project, so the new words reappear naturally in different contexts. Because of that, I translate very little nowadays. At first I thought translation was essential, but now I feel it often acts like a middleman between the word and its meaning. I’d rather build a direct connection between Chinese and the idea itself.
I’m currently around B2, working toward C1, and for the first time I can understand roughly 70–80% of podcasts and local radio from mainland China. I don’t worry anymore about understanding every single word, which has made learning much more enjoyable.
One thing I completely agree with is listening without reading at the beginning. That’s probably one of the biggest improvements I’ve made. If it’s audio only, I avoid looking at the text entirely. That’s how children learn, and I think it helps your brain build the language through sound first instead of constantly relying on written support.
I also don’t study grammar explicitly. Almost everything I’ve learned has come through massive comprehensible input and repeated exposure. The patterns gradually become automatic.
Finally, I’ve become much more selective about the material I consume. There is a huge amount of Chinese content on YouTube, but not all of it is good. Some teachers interrupt constantly, some explanations are inefficient, and a lot of videos create more noise than value. For me, fewer high-quality resources have worked much better than consuming everything I can find.
Anyway, those are just a few thoughts from my own experience. I’m enjoying the process more than ever now, especially because I’m finally starting to come out of that long intermediate plateau. Puedes añadir este párrafo justo después de la parte donde hablo de escuchar sin leer:
Of course, I do read the transcript afterwards. I’m only talking about the first pass, where I think it’s much more effective to focus entirely on the sound. What surprised me most is that I never sat down to memorize Chinese characters one by one. Simply by repeatedly listening first and then reading afterwards, the characters gradually became familiar on their own. I still can’t write most of them from memory, but I recognize a very high percentage of them instantly, and that percentage keeps growing. Even characters that I was convinced I’d never remember now jump out at me immediately when I see them—and I’m not talking about the easy ones.
