I have cousins who lived in Taiwan just ten years ago and I often think about how different their experience was from mine. Back when there wasn’t google maps. Before cell phones could double as an English-Mandarin dictionary, vegetarian restaurant suggester and bus route provider!
With all the tools available now, living surrounded by a language you don’t understand really has become so much easier. And this is also true for learning the language. Not that phones & computers can or should fully substitute for learning from real people. But they can provide wonderful extra support and variety to language study – the likes of which language learners before us could only dream of!
Here are some of our favorites….
Podcasts
Great for commutes! Podcasts are wonderful for training your ear. Podcasts were the main way I began learning Chinese back in Montana, before arriving in Taiwan. It was a HUGELY helpful!
Chineselearnonline
I first got turned on to language podcasts, when I lived in Costa Rica and was looking for ways to improve my Spanish. My favorite was Coffee Break Spanish which I still recommend to anyone I meet who’s trying to learn Spanish. I was delighted then when I discovered essentially the same program for Mandarin. This podcast starts from absolute beginner and progressively builds on each lesson. Slowly more and more of the podcast spoken in Mandarin. The lessons are practical. The amount of new material presented each week challenging but not too much. And it’s so clearly organized and easy to follow. You can download the first 60 podcasts for free and they do have a bunch of other concurrent online resources available to paying members. I did pay for a few months of content so I could download some of their higher level lessons, and it was worth every penny.
There are also apps that supplement the podcasts, that have additional text to supplement the podcast lessons, as well as flashcards and self-testing.
Youtube Videos
You won’t find an entire Beginner Mandarin courses for free on youtube. But there are a lot of little mini lessons that can help supplement your learning. And if you decide you really love that format, many of the channels are linked to comprehensive courses you can pay for (that may also provide worksheets, online quizes, etc) . I plan to write another blog post with a much longer list of available channels but here’s the top three I’d start with.
Fiona Tian’s Ez Chinese & Chinese Pod
Fiona Tian does great videos teaching Chinese lessons ranging from absolute beginner to intermediate. She is a native English / Native Chinese speaker from Taiwan and is really fun to watch. She started on her own and then joined Chinese Pod hence the two channels.
Yang Yang’s Yoyo Chinese
Yang Yang has over 300 free Chinese Lessons on youtube, most of which are at beginner to lower intermediate level. She’s from Mainland China but doesn’t have a thick Beijing accent and her English is very clear. Her lessons are very engaging.
Learn Chinese Now
These are actually lessons taught by a British guy. But frequently he has a native speaking guest on his show. Even when he doesn’t though, I value these lesson more for the clear English explanation of grammar points as opposed to using it for a native listening/speaking practice.
You can also check out our youtube channel at yesyoucan.info. There I’ve compiled Mandarin teaching playlists by topic (ie: 26 videos that teach feeling & emotion words in Chinese).
Mandarin Learning Apps
Hello Chinese
This is a fantastic free app, that begins at absolute beginner and progresses through over ___ different “chapters”. It’s basically like a free beginner course with mini grammar lessons, vocab lists, flash cards, games and quizes. You have to pass the lesson before you can go on to the next chapter or you can test out of sections if your Chinese is up to it 🙂 In order to get all of the flash cards and games you do need to pay but you can access the entire course in its limited (but still incredibly useful form) completely for free. I went through the entire course and I still go back and re-do lessons or flip through flash cards.
Mind Snacks Mandarin
This isn’t an app that teaches sentence structure or grammar or anything. It’s just a vocabularly builder. It has 50 “lessons” which are a set of vocabulary on a given subject (ie: “months & dates” , “adverbs”, etc) . For each vocabulary set there are games you can play to learn and practice the words. The games are fun and effective. And as you master more and more words you unlock new games. Unfortunately, you can only access a couple vocab sets for free. After that you have to pay. But you only pay a small fee (less then $10 I think), not a monthly subscription, and then you have it. It’s probably the best $10 I spent on Chinese learning resources my first year here, definitely the best bang for the buck. I do have one big complaint about this app though and that is that they don’t provide an option to play the games using traditional characters.Then again, this game is the only reason I can read any simplified Chinese! So maybe I’ll thank them for that someday 🙂
Chinese Skill – Learn Chinese
General Education Apps
Don’t forget about general apps that are meant as a tool to help people studying anything (including languages).
Memrise
Memrise has a huge collection of flaschards on just about every subject imaginable including of course, Mandarin Chinese! If you are studying Chinese formally with a book, check to see if Memrise has flashcard sets for that book! I can tell you they DO for the “practical audio-visual Chinese” book Josh and I used in our class and thanks to Memrise I passed most of our chapter tests! Actually I also used a premade memrise flashcard set to learn bopomofo too.
Quizlet
This is another great flashcard builder app. Create your own mandarin flashcards and use the various quizzing tools available through Quizlet to drill that vocab into your permanent memory. Memrise & Quizlet have slightly different quiz/drill activities so we often used both when studying for chapter tests. We like the ease of creating card sets and sharing it with each other.
Mandarin/English Dictionaries
Pleco
This is basically THE go-to for all Chinese learners (of all levels). It’s a free dictionary app and also has a whole host of other valuable functions available if you’re willing to pay for them (ie using your phones camera to hover over characters, like on a menu, and translate them for you)
Hanping Chinese
This app is a Chinese dictionary that lets you look up words using Zhuyin Fuhao (Bopomofo). For people using that phonetic system, it’s really a great way to look up characters by sounds, and it give you lots of result options that you can limit by tone, or in general. Just in case you have difficulties in picking up the different tones of words you hear. The lite version is sufficient for all of your needs, and there are paid options for broadening the capabilities of the app. Like including a visual translation option. There is also a Cantonese version. Unfortunately, there isn’t an OS version.
Mandarin Spot
This is another great online dictionary (though not available as an app). We use it because it will provide the Zhuyin Fuhao (Bopomofo) phonetic spelling for all Chinese words.
And don’t forget the library!
Even in my local library in Montana I was able to check out beginner Chinese books as well as an audio lesson series to download onto my computer. Here in Taiwan, it’s quite simple to get a library card with your ARC. Not only can you check out language learning resources you may find that they are hosting free Chinese classes or language exchanges you can sign up for!