A friend in China recently asked me how to improve her English. She’d struggled with it for years as a student, labeled herself “bad at languages,” and now wanted to try again for her career. But she couldn’t sustain her efforts.

I asked how she’d been studying. She said she bought grammar books, pronunciation guides, vocabulary lists, and tried to memorize them. Why? “Because I need to start from the basics and learn systematically.”

There it was. Even years after leaving school, she still had the student mindset. The education system had brainwashed her into thinking learning must be systematic, bottom-up, textbook-driven.

I told her: This is no way to learn as an adult.

Instead, find content in English you’re already interested in. Decipher it with dictionaries and AI tools. Learn vocabulary from that content. Define the “job to be done” for English—a tool for communication and understanding—and work backwards. What are you trying to understand? Read that. Make that your textbook.

As adults, we need to do a 180-degree reversal of how we learned as students.

In school, you start with foundations and work upward. You won’t apply what you learn until years later. But the basics are also the most boring. If you try to learn this way as an adult, you’ll quit.

Adults should do the opposite: Start with a real-world problem. Figure out what knowledge you need. Then go backwards to learn it.

AI accelerates this dramatically. It’s a 24/7 world-class tutor that answers any question, as long as you know what to ask.

I experienced this myself when trying to become more technical. A few years ago, I wanted to learn coding, so I watched intro CS lectures. I got bored fast. I couldn’t connect the content to anything I needed in real life.

This year, I started using AI coding tools like Google AI Studio, Replit, and Cursor. I described my product ideas in plain language, and they turned into working products in minutes. Every time an idea became real, I felt elated, empowered.

Before, screens of code gave me headaches. They reminded me of my inadequacy. Now, I saw code as just a tool to achieve my goals. I asked AI to walk me through the codebase structure, the languages and technologies, what each file did, how everything connected. I had it add detailed comments everywhere.

After a few projects, I’d learned more about coding than a year of college CS lectures. It wasn’t “systematic.” But I’m not trying to become an engineer. I’m trying to become technically literate so I can use code as a tool.

Why this reversal?

• Students’ full-time job is learning. Adults have other jobs and responsibilities. After a long day at work, who has the energy for boring lectures?
• Students must learn. The system forces accountability: exams, homework, class attendance. Adults learn purely by choice. Nobody forces you. This means sustainable learning requires intrinsic motivation. If it’s boring, you quit.
• Students have defined goals. Do well on exams. Adults must define their own goals. Otherwise, you lose motivation fast.

The common thread: Sustaining motivation is the key to learning anything as an adult. Because you’re not going to learn overnight.

So if you’re trying to learn something, start with a problem or project. Figure out the job to be done. Work backwards.

Learning becomes fun. Learning becomes sustainable.

Forget “learn first, do later.”

Do first, learn later.

You don’t get good and then produce output. You produce output and then get good.

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P.S. This post blew up on X (half a million views within 1 day). You can check it out on my X or Substack.

Published by Zara Zhang

Zara Zhang works at ByteDance in its Beijing office. Previously, she was an investment analyst at GGV Capital (first in the Menlo Park office, then in the Beijing office), a venture capital firm that invests in companies in the US, China, and other emerging markets. She has interned as a reporter covering China’s tech industry for The Information. Her writings have been published on The Harvard Crimson, Harvard Magazine, Foreign Policy, Huffington Post, and China Personified. She has also worked as a marketing intern at ZhenFund. Zara graduated from Harvard University Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in psychology. At Harvard, she wrote and edited for The Harvard Crimson, led the organization of Harvard China Forum (a 1,000-people conference featuring leaders from China and the US), and ran a weekly newsletter about food around the university. Zara grew up in Changchun, a city in northeast China, and received her secondary education in Singapore. A language enthusiast, she is trained in Chinese-English interpretation and translation, speaks French and Japanese, and can sing in Cantonese. Zara co-hosted “996”, a podcast where she and GGV managing partner Hans Tung interviewed leaders in US-China cross-border tech and entrepreneurship. Listen on iTunes, Overcast, Spotify, SoundCloud, or search “996” in any podcast app. View all posts by Zara Zhang