Study everyday. No excuses. No exceptions. Study Everyday.
1. Pinyin & Tones
For sounds, pronunciation and tones. I greatly recommend dong-chinese's full free course on pinyin then tones, especially using their tone trainer. Its my favorite beginner pronunciation guide. It also considers tone sandhi (when tones change pronunciation in certain positions). I would recommend going to youtube afterward to look up tones more in depth, tone sandhi, and any pronunciation sounds you still aren't clear on after this course.
Dong-chinese pinyin guide: https://www.dong-chinese.com/learn/sounds/pinyin .
Dong-chinese tone trainer: https://www.dong-chinese.com/learn/sounds/pinyin/toneTrainer .
Dong-chinese sentence sounds: https://www.dong-chinese.com/learn/sounds/pinyin/speaking
2.1. Words
The best way to learn new words is from context. Basically learning words you read or hear while studying or just going about your life.
It’s generally a bad idea to take words from a word list and try to memorize all of them – at least for students past the elementary level.
For beginners though, you still want to learn from context, but I don’t mind taking words straight from word lists. The reason is pretty obvious. It’s hard to learn from context if you don’t have any base words you know.
That said, assuming you’re using a textbook, course, or podcasts, you should add relevant words to your flashcard list (we’ll talk about this in a minute). It doesn’t make sense to add everything though. Just because you heard the word dinosaur, doesn’t mean you need to learn it right now.
It’s time to build your vocabulary with high-frequency words.
2.2. Grammar
Use AllSetLearning's chinese grammar guide for specific grammar I notice later when studying chinese, that I still don't grasp: https://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar/
3. Active listening
Practice practice practice.
I reccomend finding a tv show, the more realistic it is the better, maybe avoid 仙俠/historic stuff at first ;)
Just find one that interest you with chinese subtitles and it should help you start to put it together at a real speaking speed. Usually when foreigners have issue understanding chinese its issues with hearing the different tones. Just listening and practice should help. Good luck :)
Listen & read at the same time: Dushu369 and kununu8 for children’s novels online, Readibu for reading. This guide for finding appropriate novels (under books and webnovels).
Mandarin only: Home - MaoMi Chinese, Mandarin Click, Little Fox, Tea Time Chinese, qingsheng zhang, Mandarin Corner
English included: Chinesepod; Pop up chinese (http://popupchinese.com/)
watch movies, TV shows with subtitles
When you're ready, there's a ton of audiobooks online too. Ximalaya app and website (https://www.ximalaya.com/) have immense amounts of audiobooks for free. Youtube has a lot. Once you know the chinese name of a book, simply googling 'name' plus '有声读物' (audiobook) will usually find you an audiobook if one exists.
Transcription: This is a more difficult and time consuming activity where you listen to a recording and then try to write (or type) it down based on hearing alone. You'll need audio that you can pause and rewind and a written transcript for this to be fully useful. If you don't mind the subscription, Chairman's Bao is particularly good for this as they have news articles in different levels with full audio attached.
Passive Listening: Stick on Chinese radio while you're doing something else. Even if you're not paying full attention you're still training your brain to better process the sounds. You'll also be getting exposed to a greater variety of voices, accents, etc. Don't worry about full comprehension when doing this.
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I ran into the same problem. Every day I spent a couple hours at a coffee shop just watching YouTube videos, and my listening improved quickly. It’s better to get out of the house because sitting on the couch in front of the TV encourages passivity. Watching YouTube on an iPad at a cafe allowed me to double tap on the left to go back 10 seconds and relisten, as well as to pause quickly to look up words. Youtubers talking to the camera, interviews, and reality shows are better than scripted programs because conversational Chinese is so different than formal or literary chinese. EDIT: also, YouTube allows you to slow down the video to .75 or .5 speed. Super useful.
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爸爸去哪兒 is quite entertaining and good for learning because it involves fathers talking to their kids in relatively simple chinese. Basically the show recruits famous dads each season who travel with their kids all around China and do various activities. It’s actually a really well done show and frequently makes me literally LOL.
The STR Network channel has a daily comedy news show from Taiwan that’s very similar to the US shows The Late Show or Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. I think it’s really funny though you might not get many of the Taiwanese politics jokes.
China Hunan TV’s official channel has a lot of other reality shows to check out.
阿滴英文 is a Taiwanese youtuber who talks about random things from languages to food to culture.
理科太太 is a relatively newly famous Taiwanese youtuber who talks mostly about science-y things. She used to be a programmer in Silicon Valley.
Wackyboys is a relatively new channel that I find kinda weird, but it’s hugely popular in Taiwan right now so a lot of people like it. Who knows, you might have different taste from me.
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4. Reading & Writing
Now you have the internet. Immerse. Look up Chinese dramas and donghua on youtube, viki, iqiyi, etc. Look up novels - if you type a novel you know of's chinese name, plus '小说在线' (novel online), or plus 'txt,' you will easily find a ton of webnovels. If you have no idea What you want to read/watch? Go to mydramalist.com, or novelupdates.com, and browse genres you're interested in to find things you might like. Also you may find some things you like have a chinese version - How To Get Away with Murder is chinese dub/subbed on netflix, Pride and Prejudice has a english/chinese novel parallel text online, Sherlock Holmes is online in english/chinese, etc. I started getting into chinese to read untranslated novels, so mostly I look up novels and read them with Pleco Reader tool. Or watch shows in chinese with chinese subs, now that I've gotten interested in so many.
Don’t forgo writing practice. Writing aids reading because you quickly learn to recognize radicals. It also makes you look smart as hell to your non-sinophone pals
Use something to start learning hanzi. Lots of options. I loved some books (which weren't free - one was Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters, book covers 800 basic hanzi with great mnemonics for meaning and tone/sound, after that I jumped into reading). I would also recommend just looking up articles about radicals - changed my life simply learning hanzi often have one radical implying sound, which helps me guess new word's spelling when looking them up. Free anki deck with mnemonics, only for meaning: simplified: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1219175376 traditional: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1881616382 Websites also have hanzi information, like hanzicraft: https://hanzicraft.com
Buy Tuttle's Learning Chinese Characters. Use it from day one. It may seem overly complex but once you have 500+ characters floating around in your head it becomes useful for differentiating characters like 建，健，搬，般，服，报，住，注，往。。。
Do I need to know stroke order?
Stroke order not only helps you structure and proportion your handwriting correctly, but also helps you decipher others' handwriting as well (and vice versa) when you reach the point where your strokes start to naturally connect.
It may seem complicated, but it doesn't take long to get a hang of. These are some general rules:
- Left to right
- Top to bottom
- Outside to inside, close frames last
- Horizontal strokes before vertical
- Right-to-left diagonals before left-to-right diagonals
- Center first in vertically symmetric characters like 小
You can see these rules with examples here and here, and use Pleco, Yellowbridge, or Moedict (click on the character) to look up stroke order.
Finally, you may find that different regions (Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong) may have different stroke orders, but it's fairly minor and goes to show that stroke order isn't all that rigid. (Still, it's best to know the general rules.) The Wikipedia article on stroke order may be of interest, in particular this stroke order comparison of 必 among different regions at the end of the section.
5. Speaking
6. Apps
For media learning, usual contenders are ChinesePod and FluentU. I like neither of those -- way too inflexible in terms of content consumption, lackluster tooling and database. Surprisingly, I much prefer the app by a fellow Redditor u/dong_chinese, Dong Chinese. It combines reading drills (based on real sentences from Tatoeba and many other datasets) and media drills with a lot of sources (songs, children songs, special-made education videos, TED talks etc.). It also has writing drills, but I don't really find them well-made compared to, say, Skritter. Reading drills are amazing with a very nice adaptive learning curve, and for every media you always know which video exactly you can comprehend. You can add custom media, and for texts you can do TTS. I really enjoy this feature -- every day, I add some Toutiao articles, and I can really see which will provide me the most learning benefit.
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YOUTUBE: Everyday Chinese, Maaaxter English
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Repetition
Repetition is one key to success, specifically: 1) high volume, 2) varied, 3) contextual, 4) mutual reinforcing, 5) enjoyable.
Varied: learning/using grammar and vocabulary through different topics and mediums
Contextual: not learning vocabulary/grammar in isolation
Mutual reinforcing: learning activities that reinforce and/or build upon each other
Enjoyable: liking the topic and methods through which you are learning it
Another key to long-term success is routine (i.e., an organized set of habits). The cartoonist Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) wrote the book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life. He uses the term "systems" to describe a set of habits (i.e., a routine) that incrementally lead to success:
"...a system is something you do on a regular basis with a reasonable expectation that doing so will get you to a better place in your life. Systems have no deadlines, and on any given day you probably can’t tell if they’re moving you in the right direction."
This notion of "systems" is applicable to everything, including learning Mandarin.
Comprehensible Input
Comprehensible input is an important aspect of acquiring language, this video gives a high-level overview, and it's based on the work of Stephen Krashen. In this short video Dr. Krashen discusses his theory of language acquisition and comprehensible input; this lecture by Dr. Krashen (~1hr) is worth watching too.
Extensive Reading
In short, extensive reading is:
Reading material at your level (ideally ~98% comprehension)
Reading for an extended period of time
Not interrupting your reading by looking up unknown words (you can look them up after you finish reading)
For more details, search this subreddit on "extensive reading", or Google "extensive reading foundation guide" and read the first ~5 pages. You can also read this great post on www.hackingchinese.com.
Also check out this lecture by Professor Alexander Arguelles, "Reading Literature in Foreign Languages: Tool, Techniques, Target".
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WHERE TO START?
*Nail your pronunciation and pinyin down ASAP.
*Do not use mnemonic devise to remember the majority of characters (as the best alternative I've found try to find Imron's Method on Chinese-forums.com. I can provide a link when I get off work)
*Do not use rote memorization, but write characters frequently to develop proper handwriting.
*Learn characters based on frequency and relevancy of components. I can provide an amazing frequency list again, when I am off work.
*Consider learning traditional and simplified script at the same time, it's not too difficult an will only save time and trouble in the long run
*To help retain what you learn, use your Chinese as much as possible. Try thinking in Chinese, try reading in Chinese, and especially try speaking in Chinese AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE
As for some final tips: get in touch with natives, never give up (things will get strange when you start having to work on grammar patterns/complex sentence structure), anything you can learn about the language is good, and make sure you're having fun. Once your knowledge is a little more advanced you can start consuming native media, flirting with the cute Chinese cashier at her family owned grocery store. If there's ever a day you really really don't feel like studying, and there will be plenty of those, just make an effort to use Chinese.
I could continue but I'll save everyone reading the trouble. Good luck on your language learning endeavors and shoot me a message if you have any more questions or at least to remind me to post those links!
I apologize for the atrocious formatting as well, I'm on mobile.
EDIT: Okay people HERE is the awesome frequency chart.
and I posted the comment below but HERE is the thread the famous "Imron's method" comes from.
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In the beginning focus, focus on getting good habits. Learn pinyin and learn it well. Then start using your main textbook. After you get a few chapters in you'll probably want to start using whatever audio course you decide on. Use the grammar book to review whatever you've learned in your textbook (maybe a day or two after you learn it). Make sure to study daily, even if it's only for like 10 minutes a day. Flip through your phrasebooks and bring them with you to study. Keep a little notebook and write down useful vocab, the pronunciation, and an example sentence or four (as many as there are meanings for the most part). You might want to also add sentence patterns and such. Take this with you everywhere and run through it when you have time. Use an SRS to optimize your vocab learning at home. Use your dictionary to look up words you don't know (especially if you don't understand what they mean, if you have a good dictionary, it should have a decent explanation and an example for usage and whatnot).
News
Radio
Podcasts
Huge List and Summary of Other Podcasts
TV Shows
Other Websites
Alexa Rankings of Most Popular Chinese Websites
Stories
Manhua
Bilibili Comics (Chinese edition)
Tencent Comics (Chinese edition)
There are also many unofficial Chinese manhua aggregators available online - these cannot be shared here for copyright reasons, but Tachiyomi has a list. (Click "Show specific languages..." then select "Chinese - 中文")
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