Write It, Say It: All-in-One Learn Chinese the Fastest

Most Chinese courses on video teach you to listen. All-in-One Learn Chinese the Fastest (@Read_Aloud_withMe on YouTube) asks you to do two more things at the same time: write and say what you are learning. Each video puts an everyday sentence on the screen and traces its characters one after another, stroke by stroke, while you copy them onto paper and read the sentence aloud.

Here is the first lesson of the channel’s core series. Press play, get a pen, and try the first few sentences before reading on.

How a lesson works

The screen is almost empty on purpose: a dark background, one sentence in Chinese characters, and its English meaning underneath. Then the characters are written over in red, one stroke at a time, in the correct stroke order, character by character, until the whole sentence has been traced. The pace is slow enough to write along.

The sentences come from ordinary family life, the kind you would actually say at home. In Lesson 1.1, for example:

Chinese	Pinyin	Meaning
早安，老公。	Zǎo’ān, lǎogōng.	Good morning, honey. (to your husband)
早安，老妈。	Zǎo’ān, lǎomā.	Good morning, Mom.
早餐想吃什么？	Zǎocān xiǎng chī shénme?	What do you want for breakfast?
我做了粥和鸡蛋。	Wǒ zuò le zhōu hé jīdàn.	I made porridge and eggs.
我可能会晚点回家。	Wǒ kěnéng huì wǎn diǎn huí jiā.	I might be home late.
记得锁门。	Jìde suǒ mén.	Remember to lock the door.
关灯。	Guān dēng.	Turn off the light.

Every sentence comes in two formats. A short clip of about 40 seconds covers a single sentence, so you can repeat it until you can write it from memory. A long lesson video of 25–45 minutes strings a whole set of sentences together for review. The channel describes its method as combining the way young children pick up their first language — constant exposure and repetition — with spaced review based on the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve.

Why writing along helps

It is tempting to skip handwriting and learn Chinese only by typing pinyin. But writing a character trains your eye to notice its parts, and those parts are what make characters readable. In a study of Chinese children, reading ability was tied more closely to writing than to sound awareness — the opposite of what is usually found for alphabetic scripts (Tan et al., 2005). We discuss why in our essay Alongside English: Why Chinese May Become Humanity’s Second Language.

Watching every stroke drawn in order also teaches the stroke-order rules without a single lecture. You will see them again and again:

1. Top before bottom: 三 is written from the top line down.
2. Left before right: in 你, the person radical 亻 comes first.
3. Horizontal before vertical: 十 starts with the horizontal stroke.
4. Outside before inside, then close the frame: 回 draws the outer frame, fills in the middle, then closes the bottom — “enter the room, then shut the door”.
5. Middle before sides: 小 and 水 start with the centre stroke.

Correct stroke order is not just tradition: it makes your handwriting faster, neater and easier for others to read.

What else is on the channel

Since February 2026 the channel has published more than 5,300 videos, most of them one-sentence clips grouped into series. As of September 2026 they include:

Series	Videos
Learning Chinese the Fastest — the core lesson videos	37
Learn Chinese the Fastest, Read aloud with me, Write with me — one sentence per clip	1,300+
Everyday Chinese Vocabulary	1,100+
Everyday Chinese Vocabulary — Traditional characters	700+
Everyday Chinese Conversation — Traditional characters	780+
Modern Business Chinese 900	450+
Practical China Savvy 900	340
All-in-One Chinese Dictionary	329
Hot Phrases, Chinese Idioms, Original Flavor Chinese	110+
General Knowledge of Taiwan	90+

Most series use simplified characters (used in mainland China and Singapore); the series marked “Traditional” use traditional characters (used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau), so you can practise whichever script you need.

How to study with it

1. Set up. Use squared paper — Chinese exercise books with a 田字格 (tiánzìgé, a square divided into four) are ideal — and a pen or pencil.
2. One sentence at a time. Play a short clip. Read the sentence aloud, then write each character along with the red strokes. Repeat three to five times, until you can write the sentence without looking.
3. Say it every time you write it. Linking the sound, the shape and the meaning in one go is the point of the method.
4. Review with the long video. At the end of the day, play the lesson video that strings the sentences together and write along once more.
5. Space your reviews. Come back to the same lesson after one, two, four and seven days. Each time it will take less effort.
6. Mix in listening. Pair the channel with our graded story and tone trainer to practise the same skills in other ways.

Watch it

• Channel: All-in-One Learn Chinese the Fastest on YouTube
• Core series: Learning Chinese the Fastest playlist

Which sentence did you write first? Share it — in characters — in the discussion below.