中文 Literacy Speedrun: Cyborg Learning
Knowing how to pronounce the word "cabbage" but having to ask family to read the menu and order the dish is a truly emasculating experience. I, like many second-generation Chinese immigrants, had the literacy of a farmer who began to till the fields at five, long before getting to touch a book. Owing to a few false starts of the past, I could write my name and recognize a few dozen characters, but I kept putting off the work it would take to learn how to fucking read.
In the autumn of 2025 I began a yearlong sabbatical from work. In the first week I realized I'd run out of excuses.
As an uncultured swine who had never seriously self-studied a language before, I began my journey at an impasse. How to Chinese? If I had my way, Neuralink straight into my cerebrum; upload LEARN CHINESE DELUXE straight into the brain-computer interface and call it a day. Unfortunately being part of the lost generation, right before the singularity drives the temporal cost of learning asymptotically to zero, I needed to figure out a way to do it for real.
Because I am lazy, I went straight to the prompt window to ask how to learn. Surfacing some candidates in a well-trod domain, but with novel constraints, is a task LLMs seem to excel at. I ended up picking mostly based off vibes and spunky UI (this part ended up being very important!). I selected a site for flashcards/spaced repetition, another for graded readers, then set sail.
The cruelty of Chinese as a heritage speaker is that phonics couldn't save me. In English or French or Swahili or Dënesųłinë́ or literally every other extant orthography used by more than three people, graphemes will clue in speakers to the sounding out of a word they already know. For a beginner, Chinese logography gives nothing - calligraphic hieroglyphs all the way down. The flashcard site was helpful enough with etymological breakdowns of character components, but every once in a while I had a question so absurdly stupid it could only be indulged by an LLM:
why does 土 look like 士?
i see chinese writers tilt horizontal strokes. do they make the vertical strokes still straight down?
why does the three dot water thing on the left do the same thing as the two dot?
I think an underrated component of the LLM learning experience is that it fully materializes the concept of "no stupid questions." Even when a teacher is willing to answer anything, I can still have the psychological barrier of sounding like a kindergartener. LLMs rip that wall down with the faceless patience and depth only a machine could offer. I asked
why does this dude sound so formal?
and the LLM surfaced a delightfully overspecified term diaphasic continuum for the space spanned by 文言文 (classical chinese), 书面语 (written register), and 口语 (spoken register).
A day turned to a week and then two months. Through a steady drip feed of flashcards and children's stories, I built up a toddler's intuition for characters; enough to visit a Chinatown on vacation and parse together the characters 油 (mail) and 箱 (box) for ... "mailbox!" as I gleefully exclaimed to my partner.
Paradoxically, the more characters I picked up, the less I wanted to read. The gap between what I could recognize and what I wanted to read felt like it was widening, not shrinking. I would do my flashcard practice with zeal and when I pulled up reading four hundred sixty four with the same crippled vocabulary, I wanted to drill my eyes out. Give me a magazine or something, you know?
I sat at my desk one morning, cursor moused over yet another passage, and I couldn't bring myself to click.
Nah, chief. This ain't it.
Part II - coming soon.