Technology has made learning Chinese much easier. Still not easy, but easier than it used to be.
Modern learners have access to digital dictionaries, podcasts, videos, subtitles and apps, not to mention convenient online access to native speakers and teachers.
Compared with someone who started learning Chinese before smartphones, learners today have enormous advantages.
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This was the point in my article How technology can make learning Chinese easier.
Technology can be useful and still get in the way
But saying that technology can be useful does not mean that it’s automatically useful.
Like any tool, it depends on how you use it. A dictionary can help you read more, but it can also stop you from thinking. Subtitles can help you understand more, but they can also turn listening practice into reading practice. Flashcards can help you remember vocabulary, but they can also make you chase review counts instead of spending more time with real Chinese.
This article is not about every possible downside of technology. Cost, privacy, environmental impact, screen time and generic social media distraction are real issues, but they are not specific to learning Chinese. Nor will I spend much time saying that choosing the perfect app is not the same as learning Chinese (but I have talked about analysis paralysis here).
Instead, I want to look at something narrower: how technology can make you learn less Chinese even when it feels like it is helping.
Four traps that can stop you from learning Chinese
The basic question is this:
Does this tool help you engage more with Chinese, or does it reduce, redirect or weaken that engagement?
Technology creates four common traps:
- Technology can reduce the amount of Chinese you use.
- Technology can change what kind of Chinese you practise.
- Technology can reduce how deeply you process Chinese.
- Technology can make you chase the wrong target.
None of these means that technology is bad. In many cases, using the tool is exactly the right choice. The point is to notice what effect it has on your learning.
1. Technology can reduce the amount of Chinese you use
The first trap is that technology can remove opportunities to use Chinese.
Suppose you are in a Chinese-speaking environment and need to find your way somewhere. Without a phone, you might ask someone. You would need to explain where you want to go, understand the answer, ask for clarification and maybe try again a few minutes later. This is messy, but it is also functional, real-world practice.
With GPS, you get there faster and more reliably. That is usually good. If you are tired, late and carrying luggage, you probably don’t want a language-learning opportunity. You just want to find the hotel.
From a language-learning perspective, the problem is that GPS removes a situation where you could have used Chinese.
If this happens once, it doesn’t matter. If it happens all the time, it changes your learning environment.
Technology allows you to live, travel and solve problems while using much less Chinese than you otherwise would.
Everyday tasks can be language practice
The same thing happens with online booking. If you book a hotel, restaurant, doctor’s appointment or train ticket online, you might save time and avoid misunderstandings.
This is often the right choice. But you also avoid a phone call or face-to-face interaction that would have forced you to speak, listen, clarify and negotiate meaning.
Shopping is another good example. If you want to buy a computer, you can research everything online in your native language and order exactly what you want. That is efficient.
But you could also go to a store and talk to someone in Chinese about specifications, prices, accessories, warranties and recommendations. That might take longer, but it would also be excellent language practice.
Simpler situations work the same way. A supermarket with self-checkout is convenient, but you can often buy food without saying anything. A traditional market requires more interaction. Delivery apps let you order food without talking to anyone.
Similarly, machine translation removes reading opportunities. If you translate an entire Chinese website, menu, notice, form or sign into English, you get the information directly. Sometimes that’s what you want, but if you do this by default, you remove many chances to practise reading the kind of Chinese people actually encounter in daily life.
The same goes for English-language interfaces, expat forums, bilingual support channels and friends who can handle things for you.
Accomplishing something in Chinese takes longer, but teaches you more
Systematically letting technology solve problems for you that you could have used Chinese to solve yourself is very bad for your language development in the long term.
This doesn’t mean that you should go completely analogue; sometimes convenience matters more than language learning, the problem is if this becomes your default approach.
2. Technology can change what kind of Chinese you practise
The second trap is more subtle. Technology does not remove Chinese entirely, but changes which skill you are practising.
Reading is not the same as listening
Transcripts are a good example of this. If you are listening to a podcast in Chinese and read the transcript at the same time, you are still engaging with Chinese, but you’re no longer making sense of the content through listening.
If your goal is to understand the content, reading along might be a good idea; if your goal is to improve listening ability, reading along changes the task. You improve your listening ability by listening, not by reading.
If you want to read a transcript, do that after you listen.
Chinese subtitles and transcripts: Reading before, while or after listening
The reverse can also happen. Audio versions of articles are excellent to combine with walking, cooking or commuting, but they won’t improve your ability to reconcile characters, segment sentences and make sense of written Chinese.
Handwriting, typing and Pinyin over characters
Typing instead of handwriting is perhaps the clearest example of technology transforming one activity into another.
Typing Chinese is a valid way to produce Chinese text, and for most learners, being able to type matters far more than being able to write every character by hand from memory. But typing is not handwriting. If your goal is digital communication, typing is enough. If your goal is to write characters by hand, typing will not train that skill.
Showing Pinyin above characters is another example. Pinyin support can be useful, especially for beginners, but the danger is that you stop reading the characters and look at the Pinyin instead.
This is a good reminder that technology is awesome. For most people, it makes no sense to spend two-thirds of your study time on learning to write Chinese characters by hand. Digital technology allows you to bypass that and still be able to communicate in writing. This is overwhelmingly a good thing!
For a more carefully structured argument about this, see Chinese character learning for all students.
Ask yourself what you’re trying to achieve
This category is not about saying that one form of practice is better than another. Often, changing the skill is exactly what you want, as the typing vs. handwriting example above showed.
The problem is when you don’t notice the change and think that you’re doing one thing while actually doing another.
3. Technology can reduce how deeply you process Chinese
The third trap is that technology can make engagement with Chinese too shallow. You are practising the right skill, but with less mental effort than ideal.
Technology should support your learning, not stop you from thinking
Digital dictionaries are one of the best examples of the dual nature of technology. On the one hand, they make reading so much easier, but on the other hand, they can stop you from thinking for yourself if overused.
If you hover over every unknown word immediately, or even just slide with your cursor over the sentence, reading the pop-up definitions, you are not fully reading anymore. With this kind of reading, you don’t develop good reading strategies, such as relying on contextual clues, relying on character or component knowledge to guess the meaning, or simply keep reading and see if the ambiguity resolves itself later.
The problem is not the dictionary. The problem is using the dictionary before your brain has had a chance to do anything.
Grammar explanations and AI tools
The same can be said about other forms of information that are, in a sense, too easy to access. Suppose you read a sentence and don’t understand it. Today, you can often paste it into an AI tool and ask what it means.
This can be extremely useful, but if the answer is too easy to access, it might tempt you to reach for it too soon.
If you ask for an explanation after you have tried to understand the sentence, the tool helps you get unstuck. That’s good.
If you ask before you have tried, the tool does the work you should have done yourself. You get the answer, but you skip the noticing, guessing, testing and revising of your understanding that would have helped you learn. That’s not good.
Feedback only helps if you process it
AI or grammar-tool corrections can also reduce processing depth. If you write a text and let AI correct it, that can be useful, but if you simply accept all changes, you won’t learn much.
The learning happens when you compare your version with the corrected version, notice patterns, ask why something was changed and maybe rewrite similar sentences yourself.
Admittedly, this problem is not limited to AI or even digital technology in general. Many students ignore teacher feedback or blindly accept edits made by humans too.
From a learning perspective, it doesn’t really matter if you asked your language exchange partner or ChatGPT to write or upgrade the text for you, you won’t learn much from the experience either way.
Because of its speed and accessibility, however, AI tools make this behaviour much more tempting.
Not all difficulty is bad; not all effort is wasted
The important distinction here is between wasted effort and useful effort.
Wasted effort is looking up a character in a paper dictionary for three minutes when a digital dictionary can do it instantly. Useful effort is trying to understand a sentence before asking for help.
Learning to write thousands of characters by hand even though you don’t actually need it or want it is bad. Typing is the way to go. But if you need or want to write by hand, typing isn’t enough.
Technology is best when it reduces wasted effort. It becomes a problem when it reduces useful effort.
Use help after you have tried, not before you have engaged
This does not mean you should suffer through material that is too hard. If you are stuck, use the tools. If an explanation lets you continue reading, use it. If a dictionary lets you read ten pages instead of one, use it. But do not let instant help prevent you from ever doing the thinking that makes learning happen.
Also, don’t forget that there’s a much simpler and better solution: choose simple tasks or easier content!
4. Technology can make you chase the wrong target.
The fourth trap is that technology can make you chase the wrong target. Progress is not meaningful just because it’s measurable.
Numbers can make some activities feel more useful than they are
Most of the activities you should engage in when learning Chinese are hard to measure. How do you measure your level of engagement in a conversation, how focused you were when listening to a podcast or how much you enjoyed a graded reader?
Learning apps offer measurable progress. They give you streaks, XP, badges, completion bars, and little congratulatory pop-ups with confetti. It feels satisfying because it confirms that you did something.
This is not bad in itself. Streaks can build habits, XP can motivate, completion bars can help you see that you are moving forward. Measurement can be especially helpful when progress is hard to feel.
But measurable progress is not the same as meaningful progress. The problem is when the measurable activity crowds out the meaningful one, when you study in DuoLingo instead of reading a graded reader, or you choose to maintain an app streak instead of listening to a podcast.
Flashcard numbers can distort priorities
Flashcards are another good example. Having a deck with almost 30,000 words in it sounds impressive, but your Chinese ability is not measured by how many flashcards you have studied, let alone how many words you have in your deck.
Clearing the queue in the spaced repetition software of your choice is similar. “No cards due” feels like success, but it is not the same as learning Chinese well. If clearing the queue prevents you from reading, listening or using the words in context, the tool has distorted your priorities.
Finishing textbooks and courses can create an illusion of progress
Textbook and course completion can work the same way. Finishing a unit feels like progress. It probably is progress, but completing a unit is not the same as being able to understand or use the language.
This can give rise to an illusion of progress. A course can take you further and further along one carefully prepared path, but that path might be narrow. You might understand increasingly difficult textbook texts because the course has prepared you for exactly those texts, not because you can understand similar language in the wild. How many chapters or courses you’ve finished can be a poor measurement of how much Chinese you’ve learnt.
Don’t let the tool choose your priorities
The general problem is not measurement. The problem is confusing what is easy to measure with what matters most.
Ask yourself: Am I doing this because it is the best thing for my Chinese, or because the tool makes it feel productive?
For more about the pros and cons of measurable progress, see Effective progress or experience points? The double-edged sword of measuring your Chinese learning.
Effective progress or experience points? The double-edged sword of measuring your Chinese learning
Use technology, but use it wisely
Technology has made learning Chinese substantially easier. I don’t want to go back to paper dictionaries, scarce listening materials, hard-to-find texts and limited access to native speakers. Most learners today can read more, listen more, write more, speak more and get better feedback than learners in earlier decades could reasonably hope for.
The answer is not to reject technology. The answer is to use it wisely and with a clear purpose.
When you use a tool, ask:
- Does this reduce the amount of Chinese I use?
- Does this change which skill I am practising in an unintended way?
- Does this make me process the Chinese less deeply?
- Does this make me chase a measurable proxy instead of meaningful progress?
If the answer is yes, that does not automatically mean you should stop using the tool, but you should be aware of the tradeoffs involved.
If you can avoid these traps, digital technology remains one of the best things ever to happen to Chinese learners. Use it, but use it wisely.
Editor’s note: This article, originally published in 2016, was rewritten and republished in June 2026.
7 comments
These two articles on learning Chinese through technology have been most helpful, thanks to the webmaster of Hacking Chinese. I find myself using Pleco on my android phone a lot, and before I got to know this website, I never used Anki. Now, Anki is part of my life. Then again, when I can’t use the Internet (or my phone battery runs out), I still use my small pocket dictionary of ‘chengyu’. I ‘type’ and I ‘write’ Chinese characters. Thanks to you, I am learning a lot from this website. I look forward to reading your next article.
I’m Chinese, I’m learning English now. If you want to learn Chinese, I can speak to you in Chinese, I hope you could speak in English to me as exchange. My address is: mphyatyh (at) yeah (dot) net, My name is Yan.
20 May 2016 Dear Yan: I have been studying Chinese since I was retired in 2013. I have several local teachers with whom I study regularly. I have nobody to talk to online. I teach English to a young child in China. We use WeChat. That has been moderately successful so far. I live in Princeton, New Jersey, USA. I also desire to begin reading and writing “hanzi.” I hope to hear from you.
Hi Olle,
As someone (and an educator) who can type and speak fluently but has all but forgotten how to write, I have very strong views on this. How often, in 2016, does one need to write a character by hand in real life? Unless you’re a student taking Chinese or academic subjects in Chinese, almost never! Soon, even exams will be on-screen (my grade 10 maths students recently completed their first ever completely digital exams as part of their International Baccalaureate programme, and this trend looks set to roll out to senior high school exams in the next 5 years).
In the near future, the only reason to learn to write characters will be to help you learn how to read them. But I maintain there is another path. Maintaining discipline during tablet/kindle reading practice (turn off notifications etc) and smart use of SRS flashcards (ie make sure you add characters to your deck that you can’t figure out via context), combined with plenty of typing practice with native speakers (email, wechat, forums, Facebook and blog posting, etc) can achieve very good results.
If, in the future digital environment, the training wheels will almost always be there anyway, who cares if you occasionally have to look up an infrequently seen character? If you have your grammar structures down, can type and speak fluently, and don’t resort to Google translate, haven’t you achieved the goal of being able to effectively communicate and function in a Chinese immersion environment?
Benson
PS – I learnt to speak Chinese in the early 2000s by jumping on hard seat trains in backwater China and finding places that aren’t in the guidebook (and my phone was a Nokia brick). I don’t know about Taiwan, but have you ever tried asking someone in Mainland China for directions? It seems map reading and giving directions are 2 topics that are missing from their national curriculum 🙂
I mostly agree with what you say and I think handwriting is mostly done for two reasons: better understanding of characters and better retention in general. Most people I’ve talked to agree that knowing how to write a character also means they are much more likely to know how to read it as well. I also think that there’s a merit in handwriting for beginners since they need to understand the basics of how Chinese characters work, so I can’t really imagine someone aiming for all four skills skipping handwriting entirely. Exactly how much they should spend on that is a matter of debate, though. I usually toss out the number 1000 since that covers most of the basic characters, but if it’s done purely for reading purposes, fewer could work too.
Olle,
another great article. You are very prolific these days.
What do you mean “they are much more likely to know how to read it”?
In English or any phonetic language this question is not in place, however in ideographic Chinese language – to read can be divided in A to produce the sound of the word from the ideogram, B – to comprehend the ideogram’s meaning. In other words A is recall for pronunciation, B is recall for meaning.
On the note of learning a language with wheels. Learning language takes time, brain has limited retention capacity and needs time to consolidate the new inputs/intakes for recall and eventually reproduction. I see the technology being developed in 3 ways – 1.to speed up comprehension of the foreign language material, 2. to perfect long known methodology of SR learning, 3. to dopamine spike and motivate learners in their pursuit of language.
Cheers from Chongqing.
MH
I mean that being able to write something more or less guarantees that you can also read it, but the opposite is not true (and the difference is huge compared to, say, English). The context here is that practising handwriting might be worth it, not because you need to write everything by hand all the time, but because it etches the character into your memory a lot deeper than just reading does.