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.
CLO is progressive so it helps reminding the bases and the written language (thanks to the new feature that teaches how to write the characters). It is also a real online "tutor", and everyone knows that repetition is the only way to learn a foreign language with efficiency. I also use Chinesepod as a complement for spoken language. I think these two chinese podcasts should not be considered as competitors, but as complementary tools. I hadn't spoken chinese for three years until I found your website. I am so happy to recover my former level and even more.
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.
I have a close Chinese friend who listened to some of the recordings on my IPod - she said go with CLO. She constantly remarks on my great accent which she says is always the biggest problem.
I travel a great deal and knowing Chinese, even a little, can only be helpful when 1/4 to 1/3 of the worlds' population speaks Mandarin Chinese. You are doing a great job - I seem to be going very slowly; however, my friend says I am not but rather she is impressed with where I am and again is most concerned about the correct accent.
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.
I first sampled this site by listening and learning through the non-premium feeds, and i learnt so much just through that, now i am premium subscriber, my learning has now rocketed. Your user friendly and cheerful mid lesson banter adds a more approachable feeling to learning, making a difficult language not such daunting task to do.