I hate flashcards.

Don’t get me wrong, I know that they can be super useful, especially for rote memorization. There’s a reason why every med student carries around a stack of flashcards to flip through every time they have more than 10 seconds to spare.

But for me personally, from preschool through undergrad, the only reason I ever created flashcards was because it was required for an English class. Or something. I think they were trying to teach us how making flashcards can help learn the material. Either way, I didn’t use them and promptly threw them away. Since then — no flashcards. Until I started learning Chinese two years ago.

When I started (re-)learning Chinese, I did the usual internet generation thing and looked online to see what kind of advice people had. And the consensus was pretty overwhelming: use flashcards and a spaced repetition system. So I took the advice, downloaded Pleco, bought the flashcard add-on, and started reviewing flashcards every day.

And you know what, it was actually pretty useful for those initial few months. As is typical for an American-born Chinese (ABC) who had previously never put in much effort to learn Chinese, I could speak and understand some Chinese but my reading ability lagged behind by a long shot. So brute-forcing my way through HSK 1-2 was essentially me learning to read characters for words I already knew. As soon as I hit HSK 3 though? Insane grind. Not only did I not enjoy the process (who the hell enjoys rote memorization?), but I felt like I was memorizing a bunch of words I wasn’t actually hearing or using.

After experimenting with a number of different Chinese learning methods, I found one that works for me. And it doesn’t involve flashcards.

The Lazy Bum Method

I now present to you the Lazy Bum Method of learning Chinese, which I’ve been using for the past year and a half.

The way it works is basically just watching as much Chinese content as possible and not worrying about how level-appropriate or useful it might be. The only thing you should be concerned about is if you find the content interesting enough to binge it. As a matter of fact, if you ever find yourself forcing yourself to watch to the content, you’re doing this method wrong.

For example, I recently binge-watched all 124 episodes of《凡人修仙传》(A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality), which is a cultivation donghua.

For the uninitiated, cultivation is essentially an eastern fantasy genre in which the protagonist rises from lowly mortal to magical Taoist immortal by training (”cultivating”) their qi. The kind of language used in this donghua is extremely formal — the language used feels pretty similar to Chinese period dramas — and I absolutely needed English subtitles to understand what was going on. Regardless, I learned a bunch of new words, sayings, and grammar structures in the process. I’d wager it’s pretty much impossible to come away from binging 38 hours of Chinese content without learning anything.

Is it efficient? No. Does it work? Yes. Is it enjoyable? Way more than doing flashcards every day.

In order for this method to work you need two things: some kind of existing foundation in Chinese, and content with both English and Chinese subtitles.

Let’s break this down.

You Gotta Understand Something at Least

This method is functionally the Chinese-learning equivalent of trying to drink from a firehouse.

You’re getting bombarded with a ton of native-level content that is absolutely not made with the Chinese learner in mind, so in order to actually learn anything, your brain needs to have some place where new words can land and potentially stick. If literally everything is new to you, you’re not going to be able to form associations between words you already know and new, but related, words.

Let’s take 丹药 (dān yào) as an example. I already knew 药 means medicine, but wasn’t really familiar with the character 丹. Already knowing 药 gave me both a starting point from which I can learn the meaning of 丹药 in context — or at least, in the context of《凡人修仙传》.

This is essentially the core of the “comprehensible input” learning method, where you start with your existing language foundation and attempt to stretch a bit beyond it. The difference between the Lazy Bum method and the comprehensible input philosophy though, is that comprehensible input typically tries to have you learn at a point where you understand roughly 90% of the material provided, and a lot of the material will also repeat certain key words they want you to learn. Consequently, a lot of comprehensible input material is both really boring and really, really repetitive (surprise, it’s hard to create material that’s interesting for adults using a 1st grade vocabulary).

The Lazy Bum method on the other hand, has you watching content you’re already interested in. And there’s no need to repeat words over and over again, since the important words are going to come up pretty frequently anyway. The downside of course is that you’re probably not hitting that “90% comprehensible” mark, but that’s not your goal anyway.

Your only goal is to take away any words, sayings, or grammar structures that come up often enough that they actually stick in your brain after the fact. Lucky for you, your brain is pretty powerful. If you’re already most of the way there, I guarantee your brain will help get you across the finish line. Let’s say you individually know the characters 生 (shēng, live), 死 (sǐ, die), 有 (yǒu, have), 命 (mìng, destiny) and you come across the saying 生死有命 — pretty easy to understand, even without a translation.

Of course, having a translation helps. That’s where subtitles some in.

Seeing is Understanding

To get the obvious out of the way, if you want to learn how to read Chinese using this method, you’re going to have to have Chinese subtitles on.

No, this doesn’t mean you have to be reading the Chinese subtitles the entire time. That defeats the purpose (remember, this is the Lazy Bum method).

What this does mean is that whenever you find something a word or phrase coming up pretty often, you should glance down at the subtitles and try to match up what you’re hearing with the characters. Initially this isn’t going to be super helpful, but as you get more exposure to the characters you’ll start making a connection between them and the pronunciation you’re hearing. Enough exposure over the course of your binge-watching session, and suddenly you’ve learned how to read a new word, no flashcards required!

Well, kind of. This method is basically doing spaced-repetition flashcards, but the “spaced-repetition” part of it is dictated by how often the show actually uses any given word and the flashcards aren’t actually testing you at all. You’re just getting the characters (Chinese subtitles), pronunciation (dialogue), and definition (English subtitles) all at once. The biggest advantage this has over flashcards though is that you also get the word used in a different of context each time, which is something flashcards don’t do.

The limitation of this is that you’re not going to be learning how to hand-write the character this way. So while you might be able to see the character afterward and recognize it and its meaning, you’ll need to use pinyin to write it out.

Chinese shows typically have Chinese subtitles burned into the video, and the majority of shows that are on international-facing platforms will also have English subtitles you can turn on. So no matter what kind of content you’re interested in, the Lazy Bum method should work for you.

Choosing to Be a Lazy Bum

If flashcards are working for you, then that’s awesome — ignore the above and keep doing what you’re doing.

Ultimately, the only reason I use the Lazy Bum method is because I felt like the “recommended way” of learning Chinese wasn’t working for me. It certainly isn’t the most efficient or effective way of learning Chinese, and I believe the majority of my progress over the past year has been from actually being in China for extended periods of time and talking to people every day.

I’ve burned out on multiple hobbies in my life, each time after going really deep into them and trying to find the most efficient way to get good as possible as quickly as possible. Learning Chinese is something I plan to work on for the rest of my life — it’s certainly not something I want to burn out on.

So for the sake of my future Chinese learning self, I’m choosing to be a Lazy Bum and to just enjoy the process.