How do you get an AI to teach you Chinese?

I was told there haven't been any real advancements in CSL textbooks for over a decade, disappointingly. 

"Use AI" they said. 

OK, but how? As we all know, using AI/LLM are all about giving it the right prompts. 

So, how do you get an AI to teach you Chinese?

I'm mostly interested in oral Chinese, my pronunciation is atrocious. Someone said use it as a graded reader but I've pretty much given up on reading books in this day and age of Baidu Translate. 

I'm not an academic and don't want to study  Tang dynasty poetry  or anything.  I just want to be able to talk to  people and basically be a normal person. 

The AI I pay for is Grok, if that makes a difference.  I tried DeepSeek/Deepmind and gave up after it kept refusing to answer  apparently innocuous questions, probably because of some unknown law. 

I'm aware of the irony of asking humans this question so you needn't bother pointing that out. 😁

I’ve actually had pretty good results using AI for spoken Chinese. I don’t use it as a “teacher”, but I'm using it to design structured speaking routines.

For context, I’m upper-intermediate and live in China, so my main goal is conversational fluency. I told AI what I thought I needed to improve in my speaking, which is mainly to "keep going" and not correct myself or worry about grammar.  I asked AI to build a daily spoken fluency routine tailored to that, and after running it consistently over multiple stretches, it’s been one of the most effective things I’ve done for speaking.

The routine is simple (20–30 minutes):

• Short warm-up free speaking, just repeating sentence starters (e.g., 最近我发现…, 我最近在想…)

• Shadowing

• Quick, easy sentences

• Expand one topic and really push depth (reasons, examples, comparisons)

• A “keep talking” reflex drill — no stopping, just rephrase and continue

• A short real-life simulation (explain something like you would to a friend)

**I've attached my current detailed routine on a PDF below

I think this helps builds automaticity. Helps me stop waiting for perfect grammar and start developing the reflex to just speak, which is exactly what real conversations need.

I’ve been doing this routine for around two months and have seen carryover into daily life. Even when I stop the routine temporarily (like during CNY travel), the fluency gains seem to have stuck.

For me, the real strength of AI isn’t that it replaces learning, but rather it can generate highly personalized, structured drills/content on demand. Based on my feedback after completing the routine, it has updated it several times over the past two months and it will continue to evolve as I give feedback. I think it's powerful tool, especially for intermediate+ learners.

Another example I use AI regularly for is: I tell it about situations I run into in my daily life and have it write it out as a story in Chinese. You can't get this from any textbook.

Speaking fluency routine.pdf

This use of AI is basically like what glossika did before it went all in on its 'ai' platform, but with greater flexibility. No real human speech is a big downside, but otherwise a very good actual use case for AI in language learning imo. I do wonder what glossikas subscription numbers look like these days...

On 2/21/2026 at 12:39 PM, suMMit said:

’ve actually had pretty good results using AI for spoken Chinese. I don’t use it as a “teacher”, but I'm using it to design structured speaking routines.

Your PDF is great I really meant the prompts one would use to get it to start teaching you. 

I don't know how to design a curriculum for CSL learning. This is a different skill from language learning. 😁 

If you speak, , how do you get any feedback on your pronunciation? 

What's slow shadowing? 

Chose one clip:  which clips are these?

There are some things that AI are particularly good at:

- Generate example sentences for every word in the HSK6 syllabus.  (Or any grindy "do something 1000 times" task.)

- Generate a list of 100 words related to a topic, and I'll study the ones where I think there's a gap.

- Give me links to where native speakers have used [word] in [some part of speech].  (And I systematically go through the dictionary definitions in this way.  Some definitions are too obscure to be worthwhile.)

- Proofread my study notes---every line of thousands of lines.

- Can you give me an example paragraph where [word] is used liberally, set in the Star Wars universe?

- This is my understanding [...]; is that correct?  (I realize people say AI is sycophantic, but it's really not like that with me---it shoots down my mistakes.  I also find myself more willing to accept I'm wrong when an AI points it out.)

- Doubao, in particular, excels at transcription.  I've used it to transcribe 50+ page pdfs.

- I've studied these words [...], what's next?

- Give me concrete, actionable feedback on my writing.  (I aim for one or two things that would improve my writing, not "solve every problem all at once" because I will forget the whole lot.)

I don't think of it being good at "one specific task, and that's it", but rather it improves everything all over the board.  Obviously, it can't do everything, and it should be used as part of a well-balanced diet (not "the only tool" but rather "1 tool among 10 tools").

The Chinese AIs like Doubao, Deepseek, etc. seem to speak more like "China Chinese" than ChatGPT, etc.  It's like they have their own accents.  So I think it's worth using multiple AIs.

(I've been hearing good things about NotebookLM: it can generate whole video podcasts, but I haven't really used it---there's just too many AIs to keep up with.)

On 2/22/2026 at 7:26 AM, vellocet said:

Your PDF is great I really meant the prompts one would use to get it to start teaching you. 

The way I ended up with that pdf(which will keep evolving) was by starting a thread with AI where I told it about my current study routine, my strengths and weaknesses and asking how it could help me improve.  So what I'm suggesting to you is that you tell AI about your particular Chinese language situation and see what kind of learning routine it can come up with for you. 

On 2/22/2026 at 7:26 AM, vellocet said:

If you speak, , how do you get any feedback on your pronunciation? 

For me personally, at the moment, pronunciation feedback is not the most important thing. I need to improve my fluency(just keeping going/get it out/not hesitate all the time).   I'm sure there will come a time when AI will actually be able to give pronunciation feedback, but as far as I know not yet. But maybe it can suggest you some kind of routine where you can get feedback. Douban(free) is good for conversation though, the ai voice has hundreds of accents to choose from and sounds pretty natural. If it can understand you, that's also "some kind" of feedback. 

On 2/22/2026 at 7:26 AM, vellocet said:

What's slow shadowing? 

Chose one clip:  which clips are these?

It just means don't focus on speed, but rather mimicking the flow. I am just using a drama I'm currently watching and choose a different 40 sec scene everyday. 

Anyway, for me it recommended that I stick with the materials I currently use(watching dramas, a textbook, reading, sentence building app), but to make sure I do the fluency routine every single day and rotate the other materials following my time constraints. Every week I give it feedback on how that routine is going and it tweaks it a bit or just tells me to do the same for another week. It recommended making the videos that I have posted on another thread and helps me with them, which is also a form of feedback in that I am forced to listen to myself.  I also keep a bit of a language learning journal on another thread, where I can tell it that I ran into Xyz situation and wasn't sure how to express this, or some language win I had where I was able to get something complicated done all in Chinese.

Agree with all the uses @becky82 listed and I will say it's also good for saying "why can I never use such and such a structure/word naturally and it explains how its used differently from your native language. And something I started doing recently: I am easily sucked into time wasters online in English. I'm trying to switch it to Chinese, so I get the entertainment but not eating the time. For example, last night I watched a short about how the cast of Seinfeld did not hang out at all. So rather than reading more bout that in English(cuz I found it interesting) I just asked AI to tell me about it in Chinese. We ended up analyzing all the charcters on the show, learning about how they were cast, their bio's, the controversies they were each involved in, comparing those characters to other famous show characters. All that was info that was entertaining to me, rather than the dry textbook. Plus, it was graded to hsk 5, I can hover over hanzi, it already knows I like to keep English names like Jerry Seinfeld in English. And all these threads can see each other. There's a long history so it knows my interests, Chinese level, the grammar and words that I ask about, etc. 

Am I putting too much faith in AI? Idk, maybe, but it has been more useful/helpful/economical than most teachers I've had. I also have the luxury of living in China, so I get plenty of human interaction too. 

I suspect AI was already doing this to some extent, but I added this firm rule today across all threads and I'm going to see it goes:

Quote

using AI to help generate some eminences

What does that mean?  "Eminences" are important people, like King Charles, EInstein, or Xi Jinping.  How would that help with colloquiality?

I think it's a typo. Sentences.

On 2/19/2026 at 11:18 PM, vellocet said:

I'm mostly interested in oral Chinese, my pronunciation is atrocious.

If pronunciation is your main stumbling block, you might benefit from something like this: https://ritachinese.com

Although it is a bit pricey, it's an area the textbooks don't work on enough.