How this course works
Mandarin Chinese — 普通话 pǔtōnghuà — has more first-language speakers than any other language on earth, around 900 million, and perhaps 1.1 billion in total.
What you will be able to do
By the end you will pronounce Mandarin with correct tones, read and write pinyin fluently, recognise around 100 characters, greet people, introduce yourself, count, order food, shop, ask directions, and understand how characters are built so you can keep learning them.
You will not be fluent. Mandarin takes English speakers longer than most languages — largely because of the characters, not the grammar. What this course gives you is the foundation, built in the right order.
How the course is arranged
| MODULE | WHAT IT COVERS |
|---|---|
| Pinyin and tones | The sound system and the four tones |
| Characters | How they work, stroke order, and your first hundred |
| Grammar and conversation | Word order, measure words, questions, negation |
| Everyday Chinese | Numbers and money, family, food, time and directions |
| Reading practice | Putting it together, and where to go next |
A quiz closes each module.
The good news about Chinese grammar
This surprises people: Mandarin grammar is simpler than English grammar. There are no verb conjugations, no tenses to inflect, no plurals, no grammatical gender, no articles, and no agreement of any kind. 我吃 wǒ chī is “I eat”, “I ate”, and “I will eat” — time is added with a word, not by changing the verb.
The difficulty is entirely in the tones and the characters, which is why this course puts both first.
How to study
Tones from day one. A tone is not decoration — it is part of the word, as much as a consonant is. Learning a word without its tone means learning it wrong.
Say everything aloud, and record yourself. You cannot hear your own tones reliably while producing them.
Write characters by hand, with correct stroke order. It is what makes them stick.
A NOTE ON PINYIN Pinyin is the official romanisation, and it uses Latin letters with values that are not always English ones — q, x, c, and zh especially. Module 1 teaches those properly, so do not guess from the spelling.