Learning Traditional Chinese is daunting

It's been a while since I posted here. Not because I forgot about this journal, but because I got pulled into a SaaS project and let everything else go quiet for a stretch.

Today I want to write about something I've been avoiding for a while: actually learning the language. I've recalibrated a few things about how I work and how I create lately, and one of them was making room to pick Chinese back up.

Before I get into where things stand now, I want to look honestly at where I left off and what discouraged me enough to stop.

The comfort trap

I've lived in Taiwan for years now, long enough that I got comfortable. Comfortable enough to get through daily life without really needing Mandarin beyond the basics.

Read also: I started learning Chinese seven years too late.

That comfort became its own trap. I could order food, navigate the MRT, handle the essentials, and never sit down and learn the language properly. That's on me, not the environment.

It took until 2025 for that to really land, and once it did, I decided I was finally going for it. Even now writing this down makes me feel freakin' embarrassed.

The problem was I had no idea where to start.

Where I went wrong

My first attempt at a system looked something like this: I dabbled with physical flashcards, curated a pile of short pronunciation videos on YouTube, and started watching more Taiwanese dramas and movies to get my ear used to the sound of the language.

None of this shit stuck.

It was too scattered, and more importantly, I had nobody checking my work. There's a specific kind of blindness that comes with learning tones alone. You can repeat a word a hundred times and have no idea if your second tone is landing as a second tone or sliding into a fourth.

Without someone telling you, you can spend a year reinforcing a mistake and not find out until you say it out loud to someone and get a blank stare back. That's the part people underestimate about learning a language by yourself: it's not the lack of information, it's the lack of anyone to tell you when you're wrong.

What moved the needle, a little bit

That's what pushed me onto Tandem, looking for a language partner. Having someone to spar with, someone who could confirm whether what I was saying made sense, changed things almost immediately.

My Chinese improved the moment I had a real person checking my pronunciation instead of a screen telling me I'd tapped the right flashcard.

I still can't read for shit. But with enough effort, I got to the point where I could get through a few stories on Du Chinese with pronunciation that was close to right. That felt like real progress, the first that didn't evaporate the moment I stopped practicing.

Nobody mentions documentation

The real wall wasn't pronunciation or vocabulary. It was documentation. How the fuck do you actually build a system for what you're learning?

I'd watch a YouTube video, pick up three or four new words, and then have no good way to capture them anywhere useful.

Learning alone makes this so much worse. You end up hopping between apps, copying and pasting into some half-formed note, reformatting it later, and by the time a single word is properly logged, you've lost whatever focus you had.

Even when I did manage to document something properly, I'd still end up back on Pleco looking up the exact character or a related word I'd half-remembered.

All of that friction added up. Getting from hearing a word to having it properly saved somewhere useful could eat fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes, for one word. That's the kind of thing that quietly kills motivation before you even notice it's happening.

Credit where it's due: apps like Du Chinese, Mandarin Bean, and HelloChinese taught me a lot. They made me feel comfortable learning the language.

But the real process of learning traditional Chinese, especially the note-taking and review side of it, is a different level of daunting compared to picking up a Romance language.

Starting again, with focus

I'll write a separate post going deeper into this, but the failed first run at learning Chinese taught me something useful: there's no good solution out there for documenting, learning, and reviewing vocabulary without bouncing between several apps to do it.

That idea had been sitting in the back of my head for a long time. My first attempt at building a note-taking app for language learners, back when I was still figuring out vibe coding, failed badly.

Since then, I've kept building with Claude AI, and I'm in a much more consistent build mode now, with a handful of apps actually shipped.

So I'm going back to learn traditional Chinese, and this time the motivation isn't just that I live here. It's that I'm building a real language app to solve the exact problems that discouraged me the first time around.

I'm putting in the time, the money, and honestly the emotional investment too, which means I'm not going to just learn quietly on my own.

I want to talk to other foreigners here about what they actually struggle with, invite Taiwanese people learning English to try the app and tell me what's broken about it, and see if I can find another language partner on top of all that.

This is just the start. I've already begun building a small flashcard tool on this blog, as a first physical step rather than another idea sitting in a notes app. The next post will get into the specifics of what's really working so far and what isn't.