TL;DR (at start for better readability)
~~~My recommendations: Based on what's worked for me, I would recommend buying the Pleco bundle and working through HelloChinese with pinyin+characters. Then start either ChineseSkill for free or if you're willing to pay using LingoDeer which has more content, with only characters and no pinyin. Use Pleco OCR to look up words and get information, and use Pleco flashcards to learn characters.
~~~My request for recommendations: I'm looking for non-textbook reference materials to augment learning with apps like LingoDeer and HelloChinese, as detailed I found textbooks don't work well for me but I would like physical reference material to have something other than apps/screens to work from and to guide learning. I've been looking at buying the physical books for the Chinese Grammar Wiki and would love some other recommendations of this style of material to work through. Reading and Writing Chinese is great except for the very bad ordering of characters/radicals that make it impossible to go through start to finish at my level of learner. Alternatives for this book would be great too.
I'm also looking for good Graded Readers, and would like to know what people found to be the best, Pleco graded readers or LingQ etc.
Audio-only resources for driving would also be appreciated, Pimsleur has been okay overall but I haven't really looked into other alternatives.
~~~Main body: I'm a fairly new Chinese learner (native English speaker), about a month and a half into it and around a rough HSK ~3 based on my tests. I've been lurking here for a while and searching old posts to get material to learn from. I'd love for people to look at my lesson plan and offer advice, and also maybe I can help for other people who are getting started. Based on recommendations here I picked up:
- Pleco w/ all the main addons
- Integrated Chinese 4th ed vol 1 textbook/workbook
- Reading and Writing Chinese by Tuttle
- HelloChinese
- LingoDeer
- Pimsleur audio
Based on my research I've avoided DuoLingo, and I found I other apps were better than Memrise. Anki is obviously amazing but I use Pleco instead for now to have fewer apps to deal with.
I've had a hell of a time using Integrated Chinese and I basically have given up on it. I find it doesn't work at all for me-- it's too frustrating to look up characters and pronunciation. The voice exercises are good but the way they're all combined is just so clunky compared to apps. Not only that but I don't know if I'm doing exercises right since I don't have an answer key. Also truthfully a big problem was I just got really bored and couldn't force myself to get through it.
HelloChinese is easily the most recommended thing I've seen here and this app is great. I went through the HelloChinese tree in about a month using both character/pinyin, and then a week just doing a lot of reviews. I definitely rushed through the last few modules and probably went too fast, but I wanted to get on with the next part of my plan, which was to...
Start again with LingoDeer using only characters. I looked at a lot of apps that were listed here the most often and ChineseSkill definitely had the most recommendations after Hellochinese. LingoDeer is basically the same as ChineseSkill (same developer apparently?) but with more content on the main tree, since they now have Chinese 2, but with a few missing features like the games. They're paid only now and have a web app in beta. I have really high praise for this app overall and I'm currently about 40% through the first tree using only characters. It has great information and the exercises are good, but it definitely gets harder much faster than HelloChinese and I'm glad I did that first. I also miss the videos of native speakers from HelloChinese, they were fun and helpful. I use the Pleco OCR to look up characters in LingoDeer and to get more detailed information. This has also been helpful making connections between words which has helped me to learn.
Pimsleur has been a mixed bag for me. I've been doing it while driving. The problem I've had is that unless I already know the words and characters, I get the pronunciation wrong and it doesn't combine with the rest of my knowledge in the right way. For example 一点儿, when I heard it in Pimsleur I hadn't seen it yet in other materials and I had no idea what was being said or how it was supposed to be used until I went and looked it up. In this way I've found Pimsleur only feels comfortable as a way of reinforcing speech for things I already know, as when it gets ahead of the rest of my material it feels very awkward and disjointed. This is maybe unavoidable for audio resources.
Reading and Writing Chinese I picked up as a way to learn characters, again based on recommendations from here. I really like the overall layout for each character and I wanted something I could use to guide me through strokes and meanings for characters to practice writing them by hand to help remember them. However, this book has a completely insane order for the characters and the way the characters are ordered are almost completely useless. Radicals are mixed in together and common words are in the back of the book. There's probably a meaningful academic way they're organized but as a learner it's not at all what I would want. I was hoping I could just go through each entry one at a time in order but that would be very ineffective.
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