Studyin'

I found a great website to practice for the HSK tests, it has HSK 1-6 and focuses on character recognition, hearing the words and choosing the right answer and choosing the right pinyin. There is also some other games, check it out here.

So, long story, but my mom is in northern Tanzania and she’s going to be there for three and a half years and she’s really struggling with learning the local language, Swahili. She’s enrolled in language class right now (and it sounds like she’s got pretty good teachers that use the total immersion method so yay for that) but she’s only got a couple more months of lessons before she’s on her own. And it’s not like she hasn’t done crazier things language wise before (she started her master’s degree in the United States without knowing a word of English and also held several jobs at the same time with still no English and they weren’t the kind of jobs you could get away with without talking to people) but it’s been awhile since those days and she’s one of those people that beats herself down before she’s even started.

“Here, then, is an attempt at collecting Mandarin scholarships. They’re listed in approximate order of how wide their applicant pool is. I will try to keep this post updated. Please send updates, other scholarships to include, and other link collections to me via the contact form or leave them in the comments.”

National Security Language Initiative for Youth (NSLI-Y)!!

shuǐ dī shí chuān | dripping water wearing through a rock

you can achieve anything through perseverance

Chinese Boost grammar: This page has a list of different levels of Mandarin grammar for you to explore. What you do is choose your level and then pick a grammar pattern from the articles under that level. Each article is clearly written and gives multiple examples to help you understand what you’re learning.

a folder of many many mandarin resources

Just Learn Chinese: This website has so many things. There’s vocab/idiom explanations, grammar, and best of all stories/novels. The stories are divided into different levels of difficulty and, when reading the actual stories, have a popup dictionary when you hover over a word. The website is run by a native Mandarin speaker.

Carl Gene: Carl Gene is a professional translator and this is his blog. I’d say the stuff he posts is a little more advanced but it’s certainly worth looking around. He posts about Chinese language and history, as well as his experience working as a translator and interpreter. Really interesting stuff.

中外对话 China Dialogue: China Dialogue is a website dedicated to stories about China’s environmental issues and the articles can be read in either Mandarin or English. This is a much more advanced reading source and it is not divided into levels of difficulty. 

The Chairman’s Bao: This is an online newspaper that has stories for each HSK level. When you go to an article, you can highlight words you don’t understand and the definition will appear to the right of the text. There’s a wide range of topics covered in their articles so you’re bound to find something you like.

Read 漫画 Manhua Online: All of the manhua are written by native speakers (at least i think they are) and they’re free to read. The whole website is in Mandarin so it might that a little bit of legwork to figure out how to find what you want. I just leaf through the manhua that are at the top of the page.

Read Chinese: This website offers a huge number of texts for beginner, intermediate, and advanced learners in both traditional and simplified characters. After reading each passage there are a few questions you answer to test your comprehension of what you just read. Each passage also has pinyin, but rather than putting it with the characters it is put underneath the passage so you are forced to focus just on the characters while reading.

Hanzi Grids: Here you can make your own printable grids for practicing hanzi. To get started you just have to quickly make a free account on the website using your email. After doing so you can start working on your grid. There are some features that you have to pay for but you can still make a basic grid without the subscription. 

Easy Mandarin Books to Read: This is just a short list of suggestions for simple books to read in Mandarin. Most of them are children’s books or books of tales.

Mandarin Weekly: Mandarin Weekly is a weekly newsletter that includes loads of resources for Mandarin for all levels. The weekly emails include resources for vocab, grammar, culture, and much more. 10/10 would recommend subscribing especially since it’s free.

Ninchanese: This is a fun little website full of games and an entertaining story to help you learn basic Mandarin. There’s also an app for it so you can play both on your phone and on your computer.

Phonetic Sets of Characters: As the name suggests, this is a list of characters that have similar pronunciations. In this list they cover characters that have the same pronunciation for everything including tones and characters that have the same initials and finals but different tones. There are two other categories of similarity, but this list only covers the two.

BONUS:

Hi! Yay I’m glad it’s useful for you! I just realised I made a section for music, youtube, etc. but never actually posted it haha! So thanks for pointing that out, I’ll try to update that soon :)

Music:

I have two Spotify playlists - one is for more upbeat songs here, and the other is for more chilled songs here. I also tag any music related things as ‘chinese music’.

YouTube:

I know people’s tastes in videos vary widely, but here are a few that I enjoy:

MaoMao TV

Ryuuu TV / 學日文看日本

Mira’s Diary 米拉

LIT 我的海漂时代

Pocoyo - 中文

Fiona Tian

Evalin

朱綺綺

I’m sure there are more but I can’t seem to find them right now oops. I also try to tag any youtube/videos/movies as ‘chinese movies’.

Last summer, while I was supposed to be studying French intensively, I accidentally started studying Mandarin instead. These things happen! The best thing about Mandarin compared to some other languages I’ve studied (specifically Persian and Korean) is that there are a huge number of resources available to help learners, including a lot of very well-designed apps. After months of obsessively checking the iTunes store for the best apps and trying them out, these are my favorite six (plus a few more worth mentioning). They appear in ascending order from my least favorite to my most favorite.

Worth mentioning: A couple of apps not included on this list but worth mentioning are Pleco and Skritter. 

Pleco is a highly-regarded Chinese dictionary. I have it on my phone and do use it, but I left it off the list because I prefer another (#6 on this list). Since I’m still very much a beginner, a thorough dictionary isn’t quite so important to me right now. However, it seems like every advanced student of Mandarin recommends this app, so I had to include it.

Skritter is another app that’s highly regarded among serious students. I believe it focuses on helping with character recognition and writing. It has a subscription service that is a bit expensive, which is why I’ve never tried it; however, everyone seems to rave about it. If you’re a serious student, you should definitely look into it.

Also, I recommend downloading some Chinese-language apps designed for preschoolers. I found several of them online in the iTunes store, and a lot of them include short stories with simple words, practice with basic characters, etc. Using these apps gives you some immersive listening practice, which is fun. They can be kind of hit and miss, so I recommend downloading all you can find and seeing what you can figure out and what you like. They won’t replace any of the apps below, but they still serve a purpose.

6. WCC Dictionary This is the dictionary I use instead of Pleco. I like it primarily because of its beautiful design (something Pleco doesn’t really have). This app is mainly a dictionary, but it offers a lot more than that. For example, it has a character scanner (so you can look up words you find in books by taking a picture of the character). It also has a “story library” with a few simple books to read (with Pinyin, the characters, an English translation, and the ability to listen to the story being read). Characters are color coded if you use that as a device to help you with tones. It has a flashcard program with pre-created word lists, extensive example sentences, a section on radicals with example words, and stroke order animations. It also offers a “character of the day” and daily “homework” to motivate you to use what you learn. The dictionary itself is free, but there’s a lot of content that you have to pay to unlock, although there’s also a way to buy the content using “coins” that you earn through using the app.

5. Mindsnacks Mandarin A lot of you are already familiar with the Mindsnacks app because it’s offered for a lot of different languages (and a few school subjects like geography). This app uses games to teach Mandarin, mostly focusing on vocabulary (not grammar or sentence construction). It’s a bit limited, but it can be a really fun way to learn. After a while, the games start to feel repetitive and can get boring, but the app also has you move through levels (which allow you to unlock new games) and uses other incentives to keep you playing. The audio is an actual human, too, which is a big benefit since many apps and programs rely on Google Translate robot voices. This is a paid app, which could be a drawback.

4. FluentU This app is the reason I started learning Mandarin in the first place. I tried using it for French, but I felt like my French was too advanced to gain much from it. Even though there were advanced-level videos with vocabulary I didn’t know, FluentU doesn’t do a good job of adapting to your level and guessing which words will give you trouble. That’s perfectly fine for a beginner, though, since every word will probably give you trouble, which is why I used it for Mandarin. I think the makers of FluentU are Chinese speakers, and they seem to have focused more on Mandarin in their app. They have a built-in course you can follow, using videos they made themselves for teaching the language. The videos are pretty good, and you will feel like you’re learning a lot. There are also a lot of other videos if you want to branch out, including some catchy songs and clips from commercials or TV shows. The built-in flashcard system is a good way to review, but there’s no way to adjust their algorithms, so you might end up reviewing the same words way too often. I stopped using the program when I had 400+ words to review every day, and I just couldn’t keep up and continue advancing. This app is also very limited in the free version, and the paid subscription is VERY pricey, in my opinion, especially considering that there are other apps out there that offer more features. All of the videos are on YouTube anyway, so you can still use them to learn as you advance (or if you have a friend who can help you). I recommend this app if you want to pay for one month and use it to study intensively and advance quickly. That’s what I did, and I think it helped me out a lot.

3. ChineseSkill This is the first app that was designed to be a “Duolingo for Mandarin,” and it has a lot of great features. There’s the typical “tree” like in Duolingo, where you advance through different lessons one by one. It teaches character recognition, pronunciation, and grammar. The lessons can be really challenging for a beginner (sometimes too challenging, I thought), but it covers a lot of material. I’m not completely happy with the order in which lessons are taught (for example, there’s a lesson on shapes near the beginning that has you learn words like “triangle,” which seemed unimportant to me). The other drawback is there isn’t an easy way to review what you’ve learned (like on Duolingo when your gold-level lessons start to fade). It’s possible, but not super easy to access. Other interesting features include a tone game, a pinyin chart, a “survival kit” that’s like a travel phrasebook, and practice with stroke order. Also, this app is 100% free, which is amazing! I definitely recommend this app.

2. Social Language This app is really different from the others and is probably the most useful if you believe in speaking a language as soon as possible. I don’t think a lot of English speakers know about it because it seems to be marketed mostly to Chinese speakers. It’s a bit hard to explain, but I’ll try my best: basically, there’s a tree like you have for Duolingo, but the exercises are all to improve your speaking and pronunciation. You work through the lessons, and Chinese-speaking users rate and comment on your recordings. They can even leave voice messages to help you improve. You can do the same for them (in fact, you have to if you want to unlock higher levels). That alone makes the app worth downloading, but even better is that it includes a CHAT FEATURE that makes it very easy to interact with native speakers. You can see the profiles of hundreds of Chinese speakers who are online at any given time of day, and you can send a text or voice message to them and later add them to your friends’ list. What’s more,the ratio of Chinese to English speakers heavily favors English speakers. You will find hundreds of Chinese speakers eager to practice their English, and often you will be one of only a handful of English speakers on the app, meaning you have instant access to a chat partner any time of day or night. Have a question about your homework, something you read, or a phrase you don’t know how to pronounce? Instant, free tutoring is available 24/7 on this app, which is also FREE! I met some really nice people here without the pressure of a more formal language exchange. You can have a casual conversation any time you want, and it’s like text messaging so there’s less pressure if you’re shy about speaking Chinese. The only drawback is the same as with all language exchanges, which is that it’s sometimes difficult to balance the two languages. Also, I had problems with sending voice messages in chat, which can be frustrating. Overall, though, I’d say Social Language is a must-have.

i usually watch “latte asmr” for korean (she also does english and japanese and shes actually my favorite! she puts time stamps in the description of what she does when and most of her stuff is gender neutral once u get past the titles bc she usually says “you” instead of pronouns! i love her videos so much!!!)

for spanish i usually watch “murmullo latina asmr”! she does some nice stuff in english as well on the channel “whisper latina asmr”

and if youre learning mandarin chinese “tingting asmr” has asmr videos that help you learn chinese while you sleep! she also has a few on chinese culture!