I learned to read HSK1 Mandarin Chinese in a month, from mid-December 2024 to mid-January 2025. I exclusively used Duolingo to acquire enough knowledge of Chinese characters and radicals so I could read sentences like “The dog goes to the park.” When I saw a character I didn’t recognize, I copied and pasted th character into Google Translate and memorized the English-translated meaning. I achieved this goal by focusing on existing learning resources and considering the overall task possible, despite Mandarin’s reputation of being the most difficult language to learn. Why overcomplicate goals when simple methods can be just as effective?