Learning Chinese for free

Learning Chinese for free isn’t likely to be easy, and is not something I would particularly recommend. But everyone’s circumstances are different, and I am sure many people start learning Mandarin with the expectation of failure hanging over them – because it really is a hard language. So keeping costs down to begin with is perfectly valid and here are some tips to try and help you. How well you succeed is likely to be down to your own hard work, not to mention a bit of luck with your circumstances.

Get a language exchange partner

Short of paying for one on one tuition (expensive!), finding a good language exchange partner is probably one of the best things you can do to improve your Chinese, and best of all, it is free! Not everyone is going to be a natural teacher, so don’t be afraid to try a few partners before settling on one if you can. How much luck you have with this is likely to be out of your control, if you’re an English native living in a large city with good universities, you will likely have many options. As a native English speaker living in London I was lucky enough to find some great language exchange partners, one was even studying to be a Chinese teacher at the time which was fantastic.

If you’re not an English speaker who is lucky enough to live in a city with a large Chinese population, never fear, you are still likely to be able to find someone to practice with. Rumour has it that Chinese people live all over the world, and have interests in learning all sorts of languages, not just English, so just try your luck.

The great part about having a language exchange partner is that you can practice all the key skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking. Other free resources for studying the various skills that make up learning Chinese are below.

Reading

Obviously there is a lot of Chinese content online that you can read for free, the problem though is that text written for native speakers is not likely to be accessible for beginner learners. As a beginner, the set of reading material you can realistically expect to understand is limited. There are however websites aimed at solving this problem by providing reading materials for students of Chinese which have been graded based on how easy or hard they will be to read. Examples include the Chinese Voices project. And this site.

Understanding Chinese as you read online is also made a lot easier with a dictionary plugged into your browser. Get Firefox, and then the Perapera pop up dictionary.

Writing

Writing is probably the hardest part of learning Chinese. A lot of people just skip it entirely, relying on pinyin and digital input methods. If you are determined to write Chinese (and you should be, it is a wonderful experience), tools like Skritter exist to help you learn the stroke orders, however Skritter is expensive. At its simplest, learning to write needs just a pen and paper to practice. (Pro tip: use the narrowest tip pen you can find). However, even with pen in hand, you literally are not going to know where to start – which part of the character to write first? There are rules for this which you can search out online (generally, top left to bottom right, outside to in, but fill in the middle before closing off the outside). Luckily there are more online tools to help, A good start is the yellow bridge animated dictionary which will show you the stroke order for many characters. If you are just starting out, check 来, 国 and 过 to get a feel for the stroke order rules. Use online resources such as this to learn the stroke order, then pick up your pen and practice away.

If you have a modern smartphone and someone to communicate with, another good way to learn the stroke orders is to force yourself to use the handwriting input method built into your phone when writing text messages or emails. You can also install Wechat and find people nearby to practice communicating with.

Listening

As with reading, there is much material available online for listening to Mandarin Chinese, including mainland TV and radio stations. However for a beginner it is again better to stick with material aimed at the appropriate level. For this websites such as ChinesePod (they have a few free lessons) and cslpod are very useful and have a wealth of material available. cslpod also has a very useful pronunciation tool which lets you listen to any Chinese syllable based on the pinyin. Many of the texts in the Chinese Voices project mentioned under reading above also come with MP3s that you can listen to.

If you have a language exchange partner, I recommend you practice listening with them carefully to nail down the tones. When covering new vocabulary, get your language exchange partner to speak the word, and make yourself try to guess what the correct tone is. At first it may seem impossible, but with time it will get easier. And do consider listening to Chinese radio online occasionally too. As I wrote under “Confucius says learn Chinese every day“, a bit of passive learning even if you do not fully understand can still help your brain absorb the language.

Speaking

Practicing speaking is easy enough if you have a language exchange partner, but if not, it will be hard to know whether anyone would understand you. However, there are a few options. First is the Pimsleur system, which I would definitely recommend for someone who wants to learn how to speak Mandarin. Again, the Pimsleur system is not free, however you may get lucky and be able to borrow it from your local library (and look for some text books while you are there). Even if you cannot get hold of the Pimsleur system, I can tell you the methodology of it is to repeatedly listen and vocalise out loud what you hear, many times over. Armed with this knowledge, you can mimic the Pimsleur system to an extent by pausing and repeating the what you hear in the content available for listening mentioned above.

If you do have a language exchange partner, make the most of it and try to focus on your pronunciation. Not just tones, the importance of which is probably overrated, but the other consonants and vowel sounds which make up the language. For example, the difference between zhi, chi and shi; zi, si and ci; lu and lü, etc. From my own experience of being unable to understand people who have just started learning the language, the biggest obstacle is not so often the tones but a general inability to sound out a number of the initial consonants correctly. If you can nail these but have dodgy tones, people will often still understand you. Without these, no one will.

Flashcards

Spaced repetition of flashcards is all the rage in language learning, not just for Mandarin. Having written my own flashcards for years by hand (yes I was that crazy, but I also wanted to learn writing), I can attest that the system is a good one. I even developed my own rudimentary “spaced repetition” system before I ever learned that that was a thing. So it definitely works. As I said, I wrote my own flashcards, which is a pretty cheap way to go (just use some blank unprinted business cards). Otherwise you can find applications like Anki which are generalised flashcard learning tools not just aimed at Chinese.

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Overall there is a wealth of free resources available online to help you learn Chinese, but that doesn’t mean that learning Chinese for free will be easy. After all, there is no substitute for a native speaker to help you. If you really cannot find a language exchange partner, then paying for lessons, especially one on one lessons if you can afford it, is a great option. Alternatively, see how much progress you can make for free with the resources available, and whichever skill you find hardest to learn, or you are weakest at, consider spending some money on improving in that one area.

And if you’re an accomplished student of Mandarin, what free resources would you recommend to prospective students?