Greetings, all
I thought it'd be good to compile a list of some of the most useful or impressive tools for learning Mandarin online. I'm married to a native Mandarin speaker, and spend a lot of time in China, so I am constantly asked by people there what school I learned from or if my wife taught me (the answer is, in truth, none and no, she didn't - I started learning long before I met her, so it's a little irksome that the assumption so frequently is that I must have learned it for her when in reality....she doesn't like switching back and forth between languages and so she tends to speak English in the U.S. and Chinese in China).
These are, in MY personal experience, some of the more impressive/useful ones I've encountered. I am in no way associated with any of them and I gain nothing at all from it - I just think they're worth passing along:
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YoyoChinese - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHS3fB2zXUs - Of special note with this channel are the "Chinese on the street" format videos, and the "listening practice" videos for upper intermediate learners. So many channels and programs out there teach you a very rigid textbook style of speech - very standardized - and the reality is....people in China just do not speak that way in most cases (my wife included - she's from Yuhuan, originally, so she and her mother speak with a definite southern accent). It can be incredibly frustrating to "know" the words in theory but not understand them in actual speech because the pattern or pronunciation is different from the standard way you were taught, so I think it's a very valuable thing to bring to the table, and I have noticed a lot of other channels have begun mimicking this approach in recent years. Yangyang's breakdown of the 4 basic tones and how to ACTUALLY pronounce zh, ch, and so on is one of the best I've seen and it will bring you from butchering it to being so accurate that native speakers will show amazement. I know that when I first started learning, some of the sounds in Chinese were so alien to my ears that I just couldn't hear what the sounds were - and explanations like hers will go a long way for many people to address that problem.
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Mandarin Corner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ljse1Y94N6o - a lot of the content seems to be more geared for intermediate to upper intermediate learners who already have some foundation in Chinese, but all levels can likely gain something from the range of videos on offer here. This channel is highly underrated, and I can't recommend it enough. Again, a big part of the value is in the more natural real-world conversations and scenarios covered, and her breakdown of it all. If you're not subscribed, you should be.
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Peggy Teaches Chinese - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8QOhdcyJUE - more often delivered in English with Chinese sentence examples, this can be another very useful tool in understanding grammatical syntax - and she also has some more fun content as well. Well worth subscribing.
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Happy Chinese - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIWFv4mkJGE- a show available on youtube, geared at intermediate learners who have a solid foundation already in Chinese. This features a family who speak with a decidedly northern accent, so it's useful for practicing listening to that. The dialogue is a little bit unnatural but you can still learn a lot from it when you combine it with a pinyin-english dictionary to look up the words you don't know.
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Arch Chinese - https://www.archchinese.com/ - Fantastic tool for teaching yourself not only how to write characters - which you can look up by typing in the pinyin spelling - but even the proper stroke order, and breaks down the radicals and how to write those as well.
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Yabla Chinese-English Pinyin dictionary - https://chinese.yabla.com/chinese-english-pinyin-dictionary.php - This one is something I CONSTANTLY use because it is so convenient. My process is to watch a show or video clip in Mandarin (preferably with Chinese subtitles - not English) and pause when I hit something I don't know, then go to the tab with this dictionary and type in what I thought I heard, matching it to the character in the subtitles to be sure. VERY useful and one of my most frequently used tools.
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Pleco - an app you can download onto your phone which I use constantly in China, whenever I forget the word for something or I run into one I don't know. It allows you to bookmark and save tons of words you've already looked up for future reference, so you can recall what you learned. Best of all, it works offline, which is pretty vital in some parts of China.
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Growing up with Chinese - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63l48RwRqyg - A great situation-oriented show presented very helpfully by someone who is natively fluent in English and also grew up largely in China, so has a very strong command of the Chinese language as well. Very useful breakdowns in each episode. My main complaint is that the dialogue presented is a little slow and unnatural, but definitely a lot to be liked here.
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Medlock Method - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnmhBvZxHV4&list=PLay0wl1OxpTIhUWz8NgUHUCxYHyvKbSm6 - I used to play these videos on repeat while working at my desk at a previous job just to keep my brain reminded of vocabulary words.
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Slow and Easy Chinese - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40osZNtXRd0 great for people who are not yet comfortable with faster, more natural speech.
I am sure these are pretty popular among users here, but I thought I'd bring them up just in case anyone hadn't run into one or more of them yet. I think they're all certainly a lot more useful than paying $300 for Rosetta Stone which, to be entirely frank, is extremely limited in how useful it is and even then, only generally for extreme beginners.
If you have any recommendations of your own, please feel free to post them here for the benefit of others. Of course, the most useful tool of all is living in China and being married to a native speaker, but since not everyone has that lovely of a setup going on and can't necessarily just ask a native speaker at the drop of a hat any time they have a question, more tools are always better than fewer.
About my progression:
My first introduction to the Chinese language was when I was about 4 years old and had a playmate whose mother had come from China. In first grade, my teacher- a Chinese woman from Singapore - brought us hong bao and taught us some simple characters. After that point, I sort of forgot about it for a while, and then about 15 years ago, I re-ignited my interest in the language when it became apparent to me that my enjoyment of learning Japanese was being spoiled by the weeaboo anime craze (at that time, I was really annoyed by that, and didn't want to be associated with that crowd, so...I switched to Chinese. Stupid reason, I know, but at that age I just wanted to challenge myself by learning one of the most difficult languages anyone could pick, and one that would be useful, so that was another reason).
I remember initially struggling with things like hearing some of the sounds, hearing the tones, and the frustration of trying to apply English sentence logic to Chinese - it's really hard to teach yourself not to say "but that doesn't make any SENSE if you translate it directly!" - and I didn't have any money to go to take specialized classes or anything, so....I started just trying to teach myself online.
10 years ago, I was limited to the extreme basics: 我，你，谢谢，这个，那个，（insert place） 在哪里？ 你好！我是（insert name）。 Things like that. I remember being asked a question in Chinese by a little girl who was part of the family of the girl I was dating - she said something very simple: do you want to come to our house? But at that time...I didn't understand. I was that limited in terms of understanding actual speech (and wasn't used to the way children say things). Now....I look back and I use that moment as a benchmark whenever I get frustrated and feel like I haven't progressed as much as I wanted. Because recently, I've been living in Hangzhou and working for a company there, translating things from Chinese to English, and interacting with my colleagues using ONLY Chinese. It's still not - even now - that easy of a thing all the time but when I feel frustrated that I still have so far to go, because, at the end of the day, I still only consider myself upper intermediate level - I think back and I say "at this time, 8 years ago, I didn't know how to say any of this - and now I'm having actual conversations".
My journey continues - as none of us are EVER done with learning a language (I still expand my English vocabulary even as a college educated adult who grew up speaking it) -and my philosophy is just that....just keep improving on where you were yesterday and don't expect yourself to be 100% fluent right away. I still get frustrated when I hear things I don't understand, but again, I have to remind myself of just how far I've come even in the last 5, much less 10 years, and I look forward to where the next 5 or 10 years will take me.
That's where these come in. They're instrumental, some of them, in continuing that journey and some of them I've loved for YEARS (I remember running across Yoyo Chinese maybe 5 or 6 years ago and just LOVING the content). They're not going to make any of us natively fluent, and actually being in China is always a HUGE difference from scripted scenarios on youtube, as I learned the hard way the first time I went to China back in 2009 (boy was I humbled by THAT experience - I REALLY thought I was more ready than I actually was and I was almost brought to the point of quitting by how hard it really was to understand people in Beijing in particular). That's also why I'm a HUGE fan of channels that show you real conversations and break them down for you.
One other thing I like to do: I watch talk shows in Chinese and try to learn from them, because they use a lot of daily speech but also mix in specialized terms. So I watch the JinXing Show recently. Her stories are great fodder for learning new words.
Best of wishes on your journey and I look forward to hearing YOUR stories and recommendations, fellow students of the language!
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