Learning Chinese for a Year with Kizuna AI China Videos
Studying with Kizuna AI China Videos for One Year
It has been a year since I started learning Chinese using videos from Kizuna AI China. Personally, I’m satisfied with what I achieved, so I feel like this is a good place to wrap things up for now. Still, I learned quite a lot along the way, so I decided to write down my thoughts.
I continued doing transcription work throughout the year, but since Kizuna AI China occasionally took breaks from posting videos, the total ended up being 355 days.
When Jiang Zemin passed away, many apps and games temporarily switched their UI to black and white as a form of mourning. It also seems that social media activity sometimes becomes restrained around historically important dates.
The Transcription Workflow Became Video + Gemini Based
At the beginning, my transcription process was quite manual. I took screenshots of the video, stitched the images together, and asked ChatGPT to perform OCR.
However, thanks to the rapid development of AI, it eventually became possible to simply upload a video to Gemini and get a full transcription. Very convenient.
If you subscribe to X, you can download videos directly. After downloading, you just upload the video to Gemini. The final prompt I settled on was the following:
Please transcribe the Chinese sentences. Provide the Chinese text, Pinyin, and English translation in blocks. Also provide a Top 10 Chinese vocabulary list useful for learning when reading this text. Include the HSK level for each word. Select the 10 most difficult words from the text. Do not invent words that do not appear in the text. Use the following sample format and output in Markdown. Do not use tables. Group the main text sentence by sentence. Do not include labels like "Chinese", "Pinyin", or "English translation". ## Main Text Chinese sentence / Pinyin / English translation 打开关闭评论区 和爱哥打球吧 Dǎkāi guānbì pínglùn qū hé ài gē dǎqiú ba Open and close the comment section and play ball with Ai-ge. 打得好过瘾啊！ Dǎ dé hǎo guòyǐn a! That was really fun! ## Vocabulary List * **假期 (jiàqī)** - Meaning: vacation, holiday - HSK Level: 3–4 - Notes: used for both long and short breaks * **离开 (líkāi)** - Meaning: to leave - HSK Level: 4–5 - Notes: can refer to leaving a person or a place
What Worked Well: Increased Motivation
The biggest benefit of this approach was that it increased my motivation for language learning.
Each video only introduced about ten new vocabulary words, so the amount of new content was not huge. However, interacting with Chinese every day as part of a routine made me want to try other language learning apps as well.
When it comes to language learning, consistency matters more than efficiency. Maintaining motivation is more important than optimizing study methods.
Another interesting aspect was discovering differences between northern and southern Chinese culture, as well as the wide variety of topics discussed.
What Worked Well: Vocabulary Growth
I barely managed to pass HSK Level 5, but my actual understanding had a gap.
While my ability to convert Chinese characters ⇄ English meanings was roughly at the HSK5 level, my ability to convert Chinese characters ⇄ Pinyin felt closer to HSK4.
Compared to learn European language, where pronunciation is relatively simple, Chinese requires remembering multiple relationships:
- Chinese characters ⇄ English meaning
- Chinese characters ⇄ Chinese Pinyin
- (Chinese Pinyin ⇄ English meaning)
Having to manage these three conceptual mappings makes Chinese learning particularly difficult.
By practicing vocabulary daily using Anki and occasionally SuperChinese, my Chinese character ⇄ Pinyin vocabulary grew from about 1,250 to around 2,500 words.
The Not-So-Great Part: Always at Night
The main downside was that the videos were always posted at night.
Every day at 00:00, a video would be posted on X (probably with a 24-hour delay from when it was originally uploaded in China). Because of this, the greeting was always "Good evening" (晚上好).
Most videos followed a structure like introduction → skit → closing. While the skit portion contained various scenes, the introduction was always fixed at night.
Hearing "Good evening, good evening" every single time eventually made me feel slightly neurotic.
Final Thoughts
In the language learning world, the United Nations English Test has recently ended, and there has also been discussion about someone who scored 0 points on the English summary section of the Eiken Grade 1 exam.
Recently I’ve been listening to a lot of K-POP, which makes me want to study Korean more seriously as well. But time is limited, so I’m still deciding what to focus on next.
