Learn Mandarin Chinese
Progressive self study course for absolute beginners to intermediate learners
Progressive self study course for absolute beginners to intermediate learners
There are over 400 lessons to choose from. Absolute beginners should start at lesson 1. Each lesson continues where the last one left off.
Later lessons use the Chinese that was taught in earlier lessons. This way you are constantly reusing and remembering what was taught.
Premium subscribers get access to exercises, games and flashcard activities to reinforce what was taught.
Sign up with your Facebook account to try out the first 4 lessons of the course for free.
...I think the podcasts are really good. The grammar explanations are well done, they give good attention to teaching proper tones, and the subject matter of the lessons is on par with what Chinese Pod covers. They certainly don’t cut any corners. And since the teachers aren’t all from just the mainland or just from Taiwan, listeners are exposed to the slight accent, vocabulary, and tonal differences they’re likely to encounter in their daily encounters with Chinese people from different areas of the world. That’s a big advantage that this site has over Chinese Pod because not everybody who speaks a given language speaks it with exactly the same accent. So the more exposure you get to different regional accents, the better your listening comprehension will be. You still won’t get as much exposure to as wide a range of [bad] Chinese accents as you’re likely to encounter in real life, but that’s actually a good thing; you don’t want to learn sloppy Chinese, anyway. It’s a difficult thing to achieve balance between exposing students to what they’ll encounter in real life and teaching them correctly, and they do a good job with it. It could potentially prove a bit confusing to beginners, but as long as they keep in mind that the differences are simply a matter of accent, they’ll be just fine...
You can read the complete review here.