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 discovered your website in January 2008, started from lesson 1 and tried to catch up as fast as possible (sometimes 4-5 hours a day) - and exactly today I'm there, lesson 198!!! You did a great job referring the method (from explaining in english turning to more and more chinese or how you choose new vocabulary and repeat it) and you found a nice balance of explaining grammar or just take an expression as it is.
As far as the course goes, I started with number one just for context and I am now on lesson 57. I am not sure what level my Chinese actually is, but I have known most everything on the lessons I have finished so far. Although, it has been a great review for me on grammar, vocabulary and tones.
I have enjoyed listening to you and Kirin a lot. I think it was a great idea to have listeners from many different places, but overall, I would agree that I prefer to listen to Kirin's Taiwanese accent. Also, I just finished the level 1 review (lessons 58, 59 and 60).
In preparation for a trip overseas, I looked around for months trying to find a podcast/website that would help me learn Mandarin. So many were complicated to navigate or had really boring lesson plans. Some podcasts had audio that was not clear or were chanted by dull teachers. Some are just lists of vocabulary or phrases that you memorize, without context. A lot of bad teaching. I had almost given up and then found Chinese Learn Online. What a difference! The lessons are brief, memorable and logically arranged. The audio is clear and the narration friendly and very informative.
I just love this course and tell everybody about it at the Chinese school where I have a 2 1/2 hour-lesson once a week. It complements and puts me several steps ahead of my presential classes - everybody feels awed by the sentences I'm able to build, my vocabulary and sometimes the explanations about a certain term that even the Chinese teacher is not able to explain (sometimes it's difficult for a native person to explain the mechanism of his own language, because it's just so intuitive and automatic for him).
What you are doing right and the others aren't is two fold.
First of all, you have a progressive series. A person can actually start from the beginning and work their way up to a conversational level. All the words are accounted for. You remind people of what is new and what has been covered already. You remind them in Chinese and use English sparingly.
This is the way that it should be done. After the initial stages, a language should be taught in the target language as much as possible.
The second thing – Lessons are introduced in Chinese.