Both DeepSeek (https://chat.deepseek.com/) and ChatGPT (https://chatgpt.com/) have proven to be very helpful in learning Chinese. - ChatGPT has the excellent GPTs feature, which lets you create repeatable chat rooms that utilize the same custom instructions. - So far I've created two: - A GPT to correct my Chinese. I write Chinese, it tells me where it sounds unnatural. - A translation GPT. I write English, the GPT translates. - DeepSeek just seems "good" at fluent Chinese, even better than ChatGPT - This is just a feeling, and it's my feeling as a non-native speaker, but the ChatGPT Chinese feels like a good translation of English to Chinese. The DeepSeek version feels like a Chinese-first response. So my workflow is to use GPTs whenever I want a quick translation or correction, and then to use DeepSeek when i want to go deeper (no pun intended, truly). # Experimental Study Tactic: Movies (Movies, plural, is actually a bit optimistic. I've so far watched 0.7 movies in Chinese) I've sometimes lamented the lack of Chinese media that suites my testes. It feels particularly apparent given the various Korean movies and shows that a enjoy, but for the most part I haven't watched much Chinese media because it just doesn't resonate. _Far_ too much historical drama (although I did enjoy 还珠格格 (not sure of the english title) which might be comparable to Friends in its popularity decades ago). _However_, I enjoyed the Three Body book by Cixin Liu and he's somewhat prolific. So i decided to watch one of his movies, The Wandering Earth[^1], in Chinese. It's a grueling process, and one I could never complete while watching with others. I pause the movie very frequently and look up what people are saying. However, the upshot is that my Chinese gets noticably more fluent after watching the movie for tens of minutes. ## Mainland Chinese Variant There's something about the mainland Chinese version of Chinese that somehow seems to stick in my mind better than the Taiwanese equivalent. Mandarin from Taiwan and China are different, similar to English in Britain being different from English in the US. Totally mutually intelligible but not the same. When I first started learning Chinese in the US my teachers were initially all from China, so my initial experience of the language was from a Chinese perspective. Perhaps for that reason the linguistic quirks peculiar to China seem to resonate with me more. The Chinese style Chinese I'm thinking of is what I heard most often in Shanghai, rather than Beijing. Limited use of the "er" sound that the north is famous for, but very clear and crisp. Despite that of course, my own Chinese accent is very Taiwanese since I live in Taipei. However, watching a Chinese movie I find myself gaining fluency after just short viewing. By fluency I mean all the words come out more easily. The sentences feel more natural and effortless. If you've learned a second language, perhaps you can relate. This is my only such data point though. # Motivation For the most part I don't study Chinese and haven't in many years. It's simply not been a priority. However, I've reached the unfortunate linguistic plateau of being able to express anything... awkwardly. I can certainly express plenty of ideas fluently, with no awkwardness, but far too often I have to use some sort of roundabout explanation to come at a point indirectly. Or, my language is simply simplistic, or unnatural. Perhaps similar to phrases like "the blue big car" in English—perfectly intelligible but awkward, not "right" but some fluency standard for how things should be said. So, one of my [[Goals 2025|goals for this year]] is to improve my fluency. I've made very little progress on this goal up until the last week or so when I started experimenting more seriously with LLMs as tutors. LLMs are such a natural fit for language learning that it seems almost an underrated use case, despite many people using LLMs for exactly this. [^1]: A ridiculous movie, not recommended based on the plot. I haven't read the books so I don't know how it compares. Works fine as Chinese practice though!