Hello!
This site presents basic and intermediate Mandarin Chinese lessons for you to use for free.
Following the lessons from start to finish will provide you with a working knowledge of basic Mandarin Chinese.
A major theme for this course is providing learners with conversational hooks and ways of expanding the short, all-too-common dialogues foreigners often have with native speakers of Chinese.
As such, each section tends to cover less territory, but in a deeper and
hopefully more meaningful way.
This site is organized similar to the first two semesters of an intensive Chinese program as taught in China. As such, it is the equivalent of two years of study in a non-immersion environment.
Elementary I – This is the equivalent of an introductory Mandarin Chinese course in university. Basic greetings, essential vocabulary, and grammar are covered.
Elementary II – This would be the second semester of your first year of Mandarin class. There is a lot of review, with an emphasis on fluid usage of what you already know, and expanding your vocabulary.
Intermediate I - Introduces a lot of new material, more complex sentence constructions and grammar, and a few cultural notes.
Intermediate II - Similar to a second year, second semester Mandarin course, this is meant to expand on material presented in Intermediate I.
Each lesson has PDF downloads and audio files of native Chinese speakers.
We want to take a moment to discuss a few core concepts for this series:
- Contrary to what you might have heard, spoken Chinese is not that difficult of a language.
- We present the Chinese characters along with the pinyin. While learning to write the Chinese characters is quite difficult, we have found that sight recognition of the Chinese writing system comes fairly quickly. Thus, using only pinyin without the characters would be a disservice to you the end user.
