🇨🇳 Best Chinese (Mandarin) courses for beginners

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.

Mihalis Eleftheriou records real lessons with a real student and walks you through constructing the language yourself using cognates and logic — Spanish, French, Italian, German, Greek, Turkish, Arabic and Swahili are covered. Completely free, no ads, no sign-up, funded by donations. The Spanish course in particular is one of the most recommended free resources anywhere; the trade-off is small vocabulary and no reading or writing practice.

Covers 14 languages along an explicit CEFR path, and its best feature is the community exchange: you submit short writing or speaking exercises and real native speakers correct them, free of charge, in exchange for you correcting theirs. The free tier is limited to core lessons; Premium unlocks grammar, offline and the full path. A solid Babbel alternative if you specifically want writing practice with human feedback.

Two decades of lessons built around a short natural dialogue plus bilingual discussion, graded across six levels — the Intermediate and Upper Intermediate tiers in particular are still among the best listening material for Mandarin. Many episodes are free through podcast feeds; transcripts and exercises need a subscription. Caveat: the platform is essentially in maintenance mode, with little new content and slow support, so treat it as an archive rather than a living course.

Mark Pentleton teaches a genuine student while you listen in, across French, Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese, Swedish, Portuguese, Japanese and Gaelic. The podcast seasons are free on any podcast app and are structured as a real curriculum rather than scattered episodes; the Academy sells premium lesson notes, video and bonus audio. Ideal commuting material for beginners through B1, and the Spanish and French series are the strongest.

Designed for Mandarin rather than retrofitted from a European-language template, so it drills tones with speech recognition, teaches stroke order for handwriting, and lets you toggle pinyin off as you improve. The free tier covers a real beginner course; premium unlocks later units, immersion videos and extra review. It plateaus around HSK 3–4 — treat it as your first six months, not your whole plan.

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.

Subscription-only after a handful of free intro lessons, typically $10–15/month with big discounts on annual plans. Lessons are short, dialogue-first and explain grammar properly, which makes it a much more serious beginner course than Duolingo. It covers only 13 languages and effectively stops around B1, so it is a stepping stone rather than a destination.

The most complete HSK-aligned course track available online, with grammar explanations, vocabulary drilling and mock exams for each level, taught clearly in English with Chinese examples. If your goal is the HSK certificate for study or work in China, this is the straightest path. Courses are paid per level (a free YouTube channel previews the teaching style), and the HSK-exam focus means less everyday conversational practice.

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.

You listen to and repeat thousands of native-recorded sentences on a spaced schedule, which builds fluent output patterns without explicit grammar study. It covers 60+ languages and keeps nine minority languages (Catalan, Welsh, Taiwanese, Kurdish and others) permanently free as a preservation effort. It is expensive at roughly $20–40/month, and the repetition is monotonous — most reviewers call it effective but overpriced, so try the 7-day trial first.

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.

A long, structured course whose distinguishing idea is the Hanzi Movie Method: you assign actors, sets and props to sound and tone components, then build vivid scenes to lock in thousands of characters. Learners who bounce off rote character study often find it works where nothing else did. It is expensive (hundreds of dollars, sold as subscription or lifetime), the setup phase is heavy before you see returns, and the mnemonic system is not for everyone.

Lessons build outward from real conversations with colour-coded literal translations and cultural notes, and the catalogue includes endangered and indigenous languages nobody else covers. Retail pricing starts around $10/month, but a very large number of public libraries and universities give patrons free access — check yours before paying. Content depth per language is modest, so it suits travellers and early learners more than people pushing toward B2.

You sit in on a recorded lesson with two students and build sentences aloud alongside them, with no writing, homework or memorisation; 19 languages are available. It is remarkably good at making the core grammar of Romance languages click in a few hours. Vocabulary coverage is small, the recordings are old, and the courses after Michel Thomas's death are taught by other teachers with mixed results — treat it as a fast on-ramp, not a course of study.

Thirty-minute audio lessons force you to produce sentences out loud before you see anything written, which builds unusually good accent and recall. Subscriptions run about $15–21/month (all-access covers 50+ languages), and older courses are often available through public libraries. It is slow and vocabulary-light by design, so pair it with reading — but for commute or walking time it is the best use of otherwise dead hours.

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.

A well-sequenced beginner-to-intermediate video curriculum with unusually good pronunciation coaching and a conversational rather than exam-driven emphasis, plus a Chinese Characters course for reading. Explanations are in English and paced for absolute beginners. It is a subscription, the library stops around upper-intermediate, and there is little advanced material once you finish the main tracks.