Learn Mandarin Chinese
Progressive self study course for absolute beginners to intermediate learners
Progressive self study course for absolute beginners to intermediate learners
There are over 400 lessons to choose from. Absolute beginners should start at lesson 1. Each lesson continues where the last one left off.
Later lessons use the Chinese that was taught in earlier lessons. This way you are constantly reusing and remembering what was taught.
Premium subscribers get access to exercises, games and flashcard activities to reinforce what was taught.
Sign up with your Facebook account to try out the first 4 lessons of the course for free.
CLO is progressive so it helps reminding the bases and the written language (thanks to the new feature that teaches how to write the characters). It is also a real online "tutor", and everyone knows that repetition is the only way to learn a foreign language with efficiency. I also use Chinesepod as a complement for spoken language. I think these two chinese podcasts should not be considered as competitors, but as complementary tools. I hadn't spoken chinese for three years until I found your website. I am so happy to recover my former level and even more.
I'm sure you're a busy guy so I don't want to take up too much of your time... but I did want to say how impressed I am as I explore your website. I am a recent arrivee in Nanjing, where I hope to spend the rest of my life!! I've been here six weeks, will be in Nanjing teaching for at least this coming school year, and I love the Chinese people... but I don't know more than two or three words of Chinese! So I've been looking for a self-teaching program and have explored Pimsleur, Interactive Chinese from Sinolingua, New Approaches to Learning Chinese, etc.
In preparation for a trip overseas, I looked around for months trying to find a podcast/website that would help me learn Mandarin. So many were complicated to navigate or had really boring lesson plans. Some podcasts had audio that was not clear or were chanted by dull teachers. Some are just lists of vocabulary or phrases that you memorize, without context. A lot of bad teaching. I had almost given up and then found Chinese Learn Online. What a difference! The lessons are brief, memorable and logically arranged. The audio is clear and the narration friendly and very informative.
I think that you are doing an excellent job, and your pedagogical concept is sound. I actually learned quite a bit, while working with
your material.
What you are doing right and the others aren't is two fold.
First of all, you have a progressive series. A person can actually start from the beginning and work their way up to a conversational level. All the words are accounted for. You remind people of what is new and what has been covered already. You remind them in Chinese and use English sparingly.
This is the way that it should be done. After the initial stages, a language should be taught in the target language as much as possible.
The second thing – Lessons are introduced in Chinese.