🇨🇳 The best books for learning Chinese (Mandarin)

Classic stories (Sherlock Holmes, Jane Eyre, Chinese folk tales) rewritten with strictly controlled character sets and reset in Chinese settings, so a beginner can finish an entire book without constant lookups. Finishing one is a genuine motivation milestone that app-based reading rarely delivers. Books are cheap but paid, available in simplified and traditional, and the Level 0/1 range is narrow — you outgrow the series around HSK 4.

Four volumes of systematic grammar, dialogues and character work, used by most North American college programmes, with workbooks, audio and a web app for exercises. If you want a spine for self-study with a clear sequence and available answer keys, this is the safest choice. It is expensive, the dialogues are dated and campus-centric, and it is written for classroom use — self-learners need to supply their own speaking practice.

Foreign Service Institute, Peace Corps and DLI materials — full textbooks plus hundreds of hours of audio — are public domain and hosted here for free across dozens of languages. The depth is extraordinary and the FSI Basic courses take diplomats to professional working proficiency, which no consumer app attempts. The recordings are from the 1960s–80s, the drills are relentless, and some vocabulary is dated (Cold War era), so they suit disciplined self-studiers, not casual learners.

Each course is ~100 short bilingual dialogues with native audio: you passively absorb for months, then start an 'active wave' translating back into the target language. Books run around €30 (e-courses ~€50) across 70+ languages, and the method is a long-standing favourite among polyglots for reaching real reading fluency. Caveats: many courses are only published from French, the humour is dated, and it demands daily discipline with no gamification to carry you.

The 'Complete' books are proper structured courses with dialogues, graded exercises and downloadable audio, and the range covers languages no app touches. Quality varies noticeably by title and author, so check reviews for your specific language before buying rather than trusting the series name. Their graded readers and 'Script Hacking' alphabet guides are also worth knowing about for non-Latin scripts.

Over 70 languages, each a step-by-step beginner course written by an experienced teacher, and crucially all the audio is free to download from the companion site even if you find the book secondhand. Slightly more academic and grammar-forward than Teach Yourself, which some learners prefer. Like any book series the individual titles differ in quality; the less common languages are often the only decent course in existence.

A reading app built around finishing complete books: you pick a story at your level, tap a word or reveal a sentence's English translation when you get stuck, and it saves the words you looked up. There is one complete free book in every language and you can read a free chapter on the website without installing anything; the rest of the 1,100-book library is paid. The library is uneven: Ukrainian, Indonesian and French have dozens of stories, while Icelandic, Estonian and several Balkan languages have one or two. It is not the same as Storyglot's European Portuguese readers (storyglot.com), which are a separate project with the same name.