Online Basic Chinese Learning Course

From the four tones to your first hundred characters.

Mandarin has a reputation as the hardest language for an English speaker, and that reputation is half right. The grammar is genuinely simpler than English — no conjugation, no tense endings, no plurals, no gender, no articles, no agreement of any kind. 我吃 is “I eat”, “I ate”, and “I will eat”.

The difficulty is entirely in two places: the tones and the characters. So this course puts both first, and teaches them properly rather than hurrying past them.

Module one is the sound system — the four tones with drills, then pinyin, including the j/q/x and zh/ch/sh families that mislead every beginner who guesses from the spelling. Module two is characters: how radicals and phonetics combine, stroke order, and around a hundred characters grouped by use. Only then does the course move to grammar and conversation, where Chinese turns out to be unusually straightforward.

What makes this course different

Tones are treated as part of the word, not as an accent. A word learned without its tone is learned wrong, and the course says so from the first lesson.

Characters are taught as a system. 电话 is “electric speech” — telephone. 电脑 is “electric brain” — computer. Once you see how compounds work, vocabulary starts explaining itself.

It is honest about the timeline. Chinese progress feels flat for a long time and then jumps. Knowing that in advance is what gets learners past the point where most of them quit.

How it is organised

Six modules: getting started, pinyin and tones, characters, grammar and conversation, everyday Chinese, and reading practice. Four review quizzes, and two free preview lessons.