If you:

1. Study for 5-15 minutes on most days
2. Trust in the system

This is what you can expect:

1. In a few days, you'll know dozens (or hundreds) of Chinese words
2. In a few months, you'll know hundreds (or thousands) of words
3. In a year or more, you'll know many thousands of words, and you'll be able to maintain your large, strong vocabulary with a relatively small amount of time (10-15 minutes per day).

OK, you'll have a large vocabulary. So what?

1. Examinations (like the HSK) will be a lot easier.
2. Reading will be less taxing on your willpower. Without constant trips to a dictionary, many people find reading becomes more pleasurable, which motivates them to read more frequently.
3. You'll learn from textbooks faster. You'll be able to focus on the dialogues and grammar without the extra burden of learning new words at the same time.
4. You'll learn more from passive exposure to Mandarin. We find that our brains can often guess at the meaning of one, or maybe two unknown words in a sentence, and these can be quite impactful learning opportunities. But when a sentence has too many unknown words, it seems our brains shut off completely and just refuse to provide us any information. We become frustrated, and give up.

Should you learn words in isolation with Hack Chinese?

No. Learning words with Hack Chinese will put them into your long-term memory, but real mastery comes from using them.

We recommend using Hack Chinese alongside a holistic study program that incorporates lots of reading and lots of listening. Not only will this increase your understanding of the words, but it will make remembering them (on Hack Chinese and in real life) a lot easier.