From a Clueless Mom to TEDx Speaker and Award-Winning Teacher: My Journey to Redefine Chinese Learning
Hey, I''m Dr. Fan. I help adults and kids learn Chinese 10X more effectively—not through rote memorization, but by revealing the visual stories and inherent logical patterns that make Chinese intuitive, meaningful, and unforgettable.
But why should you trust me? Because I’ve been where you are—frustrated, stuck, and refusing to let traditional rote memorization ruin my kids' curiosity for their heritage language. In the past 10 years, in searching for a better way to make Chinese truly learnable, I transformed myself from a clueless mom into a published author, TEDx speaker, and award-winning teacher—coaching students to first-place victories in the U.S. National Chinese Speech Contest in both 2023 and 2024.
Along the way, I developed the Linguistic Signal vs. Noise Theory and the Total Radical System™ (TRS) —a revolutionary pedagogical method that eliminates rote memorization, making character learning systematic, logical, and deeply intuitive. In addition, the English Bridge™ Technique to help learners transition seamlessly from their native language to Mandarin pronunciation and tones.Together, these innovations not only transform the learning process but also accelerate fluency by harnessing the brain’s natural pattern recognition.
🚀 Here’s how it all began.
Okay, I will tell you my story and my love for Totoro.
(But you'll have to promise to tell me yours later, okay?)
Why I Stopped My Own Kids from Learning Chinese for Four Years?
I started to teach my kids Chinese at home here in the States when they started 2nd and 3rd grade respectively.
To make learning fun, we sketched pictographs together:
One (一) – a single line.
Two (二) – two lines.
Three (三) – three lines.
Person (人) – a figure standing on two feet.
Mouth (口) – an open mouth.
Mountain (山) – a three-peaked mountain.
The visuals captivated them instantly—but we quickly ran out of characters that could be easily represented with simple drawings.
After the initial excitement, I realized this method wouldn’t scale to learning 3,000 characters—the threshold for 95% proficiency in daily reading and speaking.
Talking with parents whose kids attended immersion programs or Sunday Chinese school, I noticed a clear pattern—disenchanted learning.
Today’s learners are still taught with the same rote memorization methods from decades ago.
Do you know the most common complaints I heard?
- "I forgot..."
- "It's too hard."
One mom shared, “My 7-year-old daughter cried while practicing the character 戴 (‘put on a hat’). It just didn’t make sense to her.”
Adults weren’t faring any better—most resorted to brute-force memorization, writing each character 30–40 times just to retain it.
And you know what?
It works. But it’s tedious, time-consuming, and kills motivation. (Hanban, China’s official language bureau, estimates 300 hours to learn just 150 characters for HSK Level 1! That’s 2 hours per character!)
Yet, even after all that effort, learners face one huge problem—forgetting.
Worse, when they don’t see immediate real-world application, their motivation plummets. (I get it—it’s hard to stay engaged when your peers aren’t learning alongside you. ☹)
I stopped teaching my boys—afraid of ruining their curiosity for their heritage language.
That "pause" lasted over four years.
But every day, one question lingered in my mind: How can learning Chinese characters be easier, more efficient, and fast enough to outpace forgetting—truly meaningful, not like 'filling a basket with water,' as Scott Young describes in Ultra Learning?
You might ask: "Can’t I just learn to speak Mandarin without learning characters?"
The answer? It depends. (Yes, I know—classic cliché. 😆)
If you’re heading to China, Taiwan, or Hong Kong next week and just want basic survival phrases, then no, you don’t need to learn characters. (But don’t be surprised if you feel disconnected, as memory champion Joshua Foer described in his travels to China.)
However, for my goal—raising my kids to be fluent readers and writers—skipping characters wasn’t an option.
Why Chinese Learning Needed a Rethink—through the Lens of Cognitive Science and UX Design
I was sick and tired of rote memorization.
I was sick and tired of the mindless, repetitive drills.
In Chinese, we call this “stuffing the duck” (填鸭式教育)—force-feeding knowledge without understanding.
It is boring, ineffective, and easy to forget.
As renowned linguist Stephen Krashen has theorized, language learning requires sufficient comprehensible input to be effective.
The key word here? Comprehensible.
For English speakers accustomed to alphabet-based words, Chinese characters—those square, tofu-looking symbols—can feel as impenetrable as the Great Wall itself.
Yet, most textbooks—even beginner ones—are densely packed with characters, overwhelming and intimidating learners from day one.
A User Experience Nightmare
With my multidisciplinary background in Applied Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, and User Experience Design, I couldn’t help but ask:
“Is this a comprehensible interface?”
Absolutely not.
In User Interface (UI) Design, a good interface helps users make sense of complex information. It guides, clarifies, and reduces cognitive friction.
So why wasn’t language learning designed the same way?
The Signal vs. Noise Problem in Foreign Language Learning
Now, let’s take a look at this first lesson of a popular Chinese textbook for kids used in many Sunday Chinese schools in the U.S.
At first glance, it looks just like a standard native Chinese textbook—densely packed with characters, just like those used in schools across China.
But here’s the problem.
In a native-language environment, learners are exposed to linguistic signals thousands of times a day. Chinese characters surround native speakers in daily life—on signs, menus, books, conversations, and even casual interactions.
But in a foreign-language environment, that constant exposure doesn’t exist.
This means the linguistic signal needs to be particularly strong, distinct, and separated from the noise.
Just by looking at this textbook page, can you tell what the linguistic signal is?
If you can’t immediately pinpoint it, how can a beginner?
And it’s not just kids struggling in Sunday Chinese schools.
Even at the high school and college level, the best-selling Chinese textbook, Integrated Chinese, makes the same mistake.
The issue isn’t just what’s being taught—it’s how much unnecessary information is dumped onto the learner right from the start.
On Day 1, the textbook introduces all at once:
✅ Pinyin (Romanization system for pronunciation) ✅ Tones (Mandarin’s tonal system) ✅ Writing (Chinese characters & stroke order) ✅ Morphology (Word formation and structure) ✅ Grammar & Syntax (Sentence structure and usage) ✅ Pragmatics (Contextual meaning and social usage)
Why?
Is it to make the textbook look more authoritative? To add bulk so it can sell for a higher price?
Whatever the reason, the sheer volume of dense information in these books forces teachers to teach it as part of the lesson and forces learners to read it, even when much of it is completely unnecessary at this stage.
Worse, some of the grammatical explanations are so convoluted that even I, a native speaker, find them confusing.
Imagine being a beginner—how are they supposed to make sense of this?
This is where most Chinese learning materials fail. They lack the pedagogical design and deliberation based on the principles of cognitive processing that support effective learning.
The Oracle Bone Script Breakthrough
That’s when I discovered Oracle Bone Scripts, the world’s only living ancient script still in use today. It is the jewel that crowned China’s civilization of 5000 years, credited with unifying the Middle Kingdom for more than 2000 years.
My mind was blown.
(It felt like a torch lighting up a dark tunnel.)
Why weren’t we taught this way from the start?
Learning Chinese characters through their original visual symbols makes everything so much easier.
As the old saying goes: “A picture is worth a thousand words.”
For example:
- 牛 (niú, ox) – sketched with its characteristic long horns.
- 女 (nǚ, woman) – a woman sitting on the floor, arms folded in front of her chest, accentuating her feminine, submissive posture.
But it’s more than just visuals. Each character carries a story—a window into ancient civilization and human thought.
After all, we humans are sense-making creatures.
When something makes sense, we remember it.
This will be instrumental to an organic way to learn Chinese for people of all ages.
Bridging Linguistics and UX Design for Effectiveness
I dove deep into etymology, mapped the DNA of modern Chinese characters, and developed a new methodology based on the fundamental pictographic nature of written Chinese.
Applying these principles, I published my first storybook, embedding 150 Chinese characters and phrases into the adventure of a teenage boy named “Yi” (一), meaning 'one'.
(Given my zero background in publishing, this was a total experiment for me!)
Despite zero-budget marketing, the positive responses from readers were authentic and heartwarming.
(Wow! Seeing my experiment actually work for people was incredible!)
At one of my book signing events at a local Kungfu School, a man in his 50s approached me sheepishly.
"I’ve had dyslexia all my life," he admitted, "but your book just makes sense. I recognized so many characters without even trying!"
That moment hit me.
Behind every encouraging review, I saw something deeper: learners struggling through years of ineffective methods.
I was determined to build a streamlined, effective learning system to help anyone—whether they thought they could learn Chinese or not.
So in summer 2019, I took the TEDx stage.
🎤 My talk: "Learn Chinese in the 21st Century: Grow Yourself a Chinese Language Tree."
Imagine this…
🌱 You plant a Chinese language tree, starting from its roots—300 essential Oracle Bone Script characters. 🌿 It grows branches, leaves, and low-hanging fruits, before eventually bearing 3,000 characters. 🧠 This tree doesn’t exist in a textbook—it grows in your brain. It becomes part of your neural network.
And that’s the power of learning Chinese the right way.
The Learning Plateau: Why Learning Chinese Feels Like Starting Over
As learners progress past the basics to the intermediate level, and then from intermediate to more advanced, many hit unexpected plateaus. This is the danger zone—the point where many give up, believing they’ve reached a roadblock. But in reality, it’s not a dead end; it’s a critical juncture where the right strategy makes all the difference. With the right guidance, what seems like an impassable wall becomes a breakthrough moment.
An American student who had studied in China for over two years and just passed HSK3 once told me:
💬 "I thought I had learned these characters, but every time I saw them in a new phrase, they meant something completely different. It felt like I had to start over—again and again."
This frustration is rooted in Chinese being a "semantic dense" language.
Unlike English, which relies on 13,000 words for daily communication, Chinese conveys the same range of meanings using just 3,000 common characters.
Each character isn’t just a word—it’s a flexible unit of meaning, constantly shifting based on context.
Take the character 周, for example: 📌 HSK 1-2: 周日 (Sunday), 周长 (circumference) 📌 HSK 2-4: 周身 (whole body), 周全 (thorough) 📌 HSK 4-5+: 周朝 (Zhou Dynasty), 周期 (cycle/period), 众所周知 (widely known)
Learners often memorize each phrase in isolation, without realizing they are all connected by a deeper, core meaning of 周.
📌 This is the real challenge of reaching fluency—not just learning more characters, but learning how to connect them.
Cognitive science tells us that isolated facts are harder to retain, whereas knowledge that builds on existing mental frameworks is easier to absorb.
Yet, traditional teaching methods scatter phrases across years of reading practice, leaving learners to struggle with "learning the new, forgetting the old" (学了后面忘了前面).
This is why I developed a different approach—one that reveals the underlying structure of characters instead of forcing learners to memorize endless disconnected phrases.
Yes, beyond the 10% of simple pictographs, there exists an entire network of complex characters—something I’ll break down in a separate methodology piece (insert link).
The Pandemic Pivot: How Chinestory Transformed Learning Chinese During COVID-19
In mid-March 2020, as schools and activities shifted online, I finally had the chance to integrate the Chinestory curriculum into my boys' daily routine—right alongside their band, orchestra, and tennis training.
The results? Remarkable.
From late March to May, they spent 45–60 minutes per school day using Chinestory’s Quizlet study sets.
📌 In just two months: ✅ They aced the YCT Level 4 and HSK Level 3 tests. ✅ More importantly, they became independent readers of simple Chinese books.
On Jonathan’s 12th birthday, he shared that his proudest achievement that year was becoming literate in Chinese in just two months.
But this wasn’t just a personal win.
At the same time, I took Chinestory to a global audience.
Through Outschool, I began teaching students from all over the world— 🌍 From the Torrey Pines of California to the Gold Coast of Australia. 🌍 From the pan handle of Texas to the Middle East.
But it wasn’t just about the students.
Their families were just as impacted.
I received countless emails from parents sharing their concerns and frustrations about their child’s past struggles with traditional Chinese learning.
One parent shared how their child had been preparing for HSK 4 in fourth grade, but despite years of study, he still couldn't read a real Chinese book and struggled with writing. The parent was frustrated with how cramming wasn’t helping and was relieved to find a fun, relaxed way for him to learn.
From a concerned mom 👩: "Still not read a real Chinese book, has trouble writing"
One parent shared how her daughter had been in Sunday Chinese school since age 3—just like she had as a child—but the outdated 1970s teaching approach had failed to keep her engaged. Now, at age 9, they were searching for a more effective way to help her stay connected to the language and their family’s heritage.
From a heritage family 🏠 : "her school has not evolved much from the 1970s and has been ineffective in keeping her interest."
Over spring and summer, I taught more than 250 students, earning 80+ five-star reviews.
One of my 7th-grade students, with zero prior Chinese experience, passed YCT Level 1 in less than two weeks.
That’s just epic.
The Most Fulfilling Part? Seeing the Spark.
These moments make my day & rock my world.
✨ I love witnessing the AHA! moment—that spark of realization when a child suddenly "gets it." ✨ I love seeing the excitement on their faces when they can express themselves in Chinese.
But it’s not just about the learners. See these happy parents too!
Seeing parents thrilled about their child’s progress is the most rewarding part of this journey. Watching their children thrive in a system that finally works for them has made every step worth it.
A Full-Circle Journey: Award-Winning Teacher and Student Success
Life came full circle when I returned to the classroom. I originally trained as a teacher at South China Normal University and worked as an English teacher in China before my career took a detour into high-tech.
As part of my high school teaching, I coached students for the U.S. National Chinese Speech Contest, guiding them to first-place wins two years in both 2023 and 2024.
Their victory earned them a FREE 14-day trip to China, where they explored the Forbidden City, stood before the Terracotta Soldiers, and immersed themselves in the language and culture along the way. (Not a bad reward for delivering great speeches!) In the winter of 2023, I was honored to receive the 2023 US Heartland China Association Teacher Award.
If you're looking for key insights that can transform the way you learn Chinese, check out [Conquering Chinese: Six Insights from 10 Years of Teaching], where I share the most important lessons that have helped my students succeed.
And if you're fascinated by the science behind how our brains process language and how cognitive patterns shape learning, explore [Linguistic Signal vs. Noise: Beyond Comprehensible Input]—a perspective that will change how you think about foreign language acquisition.
Once you see it, you won’t look at language learning the same way again.
May the Horse be with you! 🐎✨
