Learn Chinese from zero.

Mandarin is hard in two places: the sounds and the writing system. The grammar is small. Knowing where the difficulty sits tells you where to spend your first weeks.

Tones

Every syllable in Mandarin has a pitch shape, and the shape is part of the word. 妈 (mā, high and level) means mother. 马 (mǎ, low and dipping) means horse.

You already use pitch in English — compare “Really.” with “Really?” Mandarin uses pitch on every syllable, not only at the end of the sentence.

Your tones will be imperfect for months, and that is fine: context usually makes it clear whether you meant the mother or the horse. What matters from day one is learning every new word with its tone attached. A word memorized without its tone has to be learned twice.

Pinyin

拼音 — pinyin — spells Mandarin sounds with Latin letters. 你好 is written nǐ hǎo. It is a pronunciation guide, not the writing system: it gets the sound of each character into your head, and later you read the characters on their own.

Most letters sound roughly as you would guess. A few, like x, q, c and zh, have sounds of their own; chapter 2 covers them with audio.

Characters

A character — 汉字 — is a unit of meaning with a sound attached. 火 is fire, 山 is mountain, and 火山, fire-mountain, is a volcano. Not every word is that transparent, but many are, and once you know a few hundred characters you can often guess a new word from its parts.

There is no alphabet to sound out, which makes the start hard. But a small set of characters covers most text: large dictionaries list tens of thousands, and around a thousand of the most common ones cover roughly nine in ten characters of everyday text.

Grammar

No verb conjugations. No noun genders. No plural endings, no cases, no agreement. 我去 is “I go”; 我明天去 is “I will go tomorrow”. The verb never changes. Words such as “tomorrow” and a few small particles do the work that verb endings do in English. You will learn the most important one, 了, in chapter 5.

So the difficulty sits in the sounds and the characters. Both get easier with a little work every day, and the next eight weeks give you that work in order.

Mandarin has about 400 syllables and four tones. That is the whole sound system. Get it roughly right now, and you can say every word you learn later.

How a syllable is built

Each syllable has three parts: an initial (the starting consonant), a final (the vowel part) and a tone. There are 21 initials and about 36 finals, and together they make about 400 syllables. English has thousands more possible syllables; Mandarin keeps a small set and uses tones to tell words apart.

The four tones

One syllable, ma, and five different words. Tap each card and copy it out loud. Exaggerate at first — you can soften it later.

Three tone changes you will hear every day

Dictionaries show each character’s own tone, but a few change in speech. These three come up in your very first words, so learn to expect them:

• Two third tones in a row: the first becomes a second tone. 你好 is said ní hǎo.
• 不 (bù, not) before a fourth tone becomes bú: 不是 is said bú shì.
• 一 (yī, one) before another syllable usually changes too: yí before a fourth tone (一个, yí gè), yì before the others.

If you forget them, people will still understand you. They are worth knowing mostly so the audio doesn’t surprise you.

Every sound, with audio

Below is the complete sound inventory, each sound said at native speed inside a common word. Many of these words are in your starter deck. Don’t try to memorize the chart. Play through it once out loud, then come back to the rows that feel strange.

A few spelling habits: ü is written u after j, q and x, and a final that stands alone takes a leading y or w, so i on its own is written yi. You will pick these up by reading pinyin; no need to study them.

Six letters that trip up English speakers

Most pinyin reads the way you would guess. These six don’t. Practice them until they stop surprising you.

What is good enough

The goal right now is clear pronunciation, not a perfect accent. You are ready to move on when you can say the four tones clearly on one syllable, and hear which tone a slow, clear speaker used. Clear and consistent is enough.

Want every possible syllable demonstrated? The free Yoyo Chinese pinyin chart plays all of them. And any word in the Dengdeng dictionary or in Pleco has native audio.

There are thousands of characters, but most are built from a few hundred recurring parts. Once you know the parts, a new character looks like a combination of parts you have already seen.

Parts, not pictures

好 (good) is 女 (woman) beside 子 (child). 明 (bright) is 日 (sun) beside 月 (moon). A few hundred parts like these, the components, turn up again and again.

You don’t need to memorize the parts in a list. As you read, you see them again and again inside real characters. A few hundred characters in, most new ones look like arrangements of parts you can already name.

Sound hints

Many characters pair a meaning part with a sound part. In 妈 (mā, mother), the left half is 女, woman: the meaning. The right half is 马 (mǎ, horse), there only for its sound. Mother is “the woman word that sounds like ma”.

Thousands of characters work this way, which is why the system gets easier the more you know. Treat the sound hint as a clue, not a rule: sounds have drifted over the centuries, and the hint is often only close.

Common characters first

The 100 most common characters make up roughly 40 percent of ordinary text, and the 1,000 most common make up roughly 90 percent. You don’t need all of them; you need the frequent ones first. That is how the starter deck and the HSK 3.0 lists are ordered.

Handwriting can wait

On a phone or a computer you type pinyin, with no tones, and pick the character from a list. That is recognition, not recall of every stroke. Recognition is enough to read and type, so it comes first. Handwriting is worth learning later, but you do not need it to start reading.

When you see a new character

Ask two questions: what are its parts, and do I know any of them? Even when the answer is no, the question makes you look at the parts. If you want to go deep on components with mnemonics, Hanly is built for it.

English words work in a similar way. You can guess teleport because “television” and “telephone” already taught you tele-. A character part you know helps you in the same way.

Start with the words you will see most. The first 180 cover the verbs, connectors and everyday basics that turn up in almost every sentence. After them, you carry on through the rest of HSK 3.0 level 1.

The free starter deck

We built it from the same frequency data and dictionary the Dengdeng app runs on: the 150 most frequent words of real Chinese, plus 30 basics for numbers, time, family and daily routine. Every word has diacritical pinyin and a meaning written for beginners. Grammar words say what they do, not what a dictionary lists first.

Pick the format for the flashcard app you use:

Then: the rest of HSK 3.0 level 1

HSK 3.0 level 1 is about 500 words, and the starter deck already covers a good share of them. Once you finish the 180, keep going at the same pace. By week eight, ten new words a day takes you through most of level 1.

Prefer another tool? HSK word lists are also available in Pleco and as shared Anki decks, and you can quiz yourself on any level in the Dengdeng dictionary. Pick one tool and stay with it; switching costs more than any difference between them.

Fifteen minutes a day

Short sessions on most days beat one long session a week, because spaced repetition works on gaps between reviews. At about ten new words a day, the starter deck takes three weeks. Miss a day? Just do the next session. Don’t double up.

How to run a card

Look at the characters and try to recall both the sound and the meaning. Then reveal the answer and say the word out loud, tones and all. Mark it right only if you had both. When you keep forgetting a word, look at two example sentences for it; a word in a sentence is easier to remember than a word alone on a card.

Words teach characters

Most Mandarin words have two characters, so learning words also teaches you characters. Once you have 学 from 学生 (student) and 大学 (university), it is already familiar in a new word such as 学习 (to study).

Mandarin grammar is mostly word order and a handful of small words. Five patterns cover most of what you will write and read in these first weeks. Every example below is tappable, with audio — say each one after the voice.

Word order

我爱你 — I love you — runs word for word like English. The main difference is that time and place come before the verb: “I at seven get up”, “he tomorrow goes to Beijing”. If it helps, say the sentence in that order in English first. The sentences in chapter 7 follow it too.

是 links nouns, not adjectives

我是学生 — I am a student. But for “she is tall”, say 她很高. Adjectives don’t take 是; they usually take 很 instead, which literally means “very” but here mostly just fills the gap.

Without 很, 她高 sounds like a comparison — she’s the tall one. And 她是高 is the classic beginner slip. Everyone makes it once.

的 for “my”, “of” and “’s”

我的书 — my book. 中国的文化 — China’s culture. One little word does the work of my, your, of and ’s, which is why it is the most common character in the language.

吗 makes a question

你是学生 — you are a student. 你是学生吗？ — are you a student? No word swapping and no “do”: just add 吗 to the end.

了 for “done” or “changed”

我吃 is “I eat”. 我吃了 is “I ate” — more exactly, the eating is done. 下雨了 is “it’s started raining”: a change from before.

Textbooks spend whole chapters on 了. “Done, or changed” covers most of what you will see in your first year; the rest comes from reading.

Measure words

Chinese counts nouns with a small category word in between: not “three books” but “three volume book”, 三本书. Here 三 is three, 书 is book and 本 is the measure word for books.

When in doubt, use 个 (gè). It works almost everywhere, sounds a little plain, and is perfectly fine for a beginner. A count of 87,000 sentences found that 个 does a third of all the work, and eighteen measure words cover four-fifths — see how many you need. A few worth knowing now:

• 本 for books
• 个 for people, and many other things
• 只 for animals
• 张 for flat things: tickets, tables, photos
• 条 for long, thin things: rivers, roads, fish

The plan takes eight weeks at about 25 minutes a day. Short sessions on most days do more than long sessions now and then.

Week by week

Each week has one focus. The chapters tell you what to learn; this tells you when. If a week runs long, take the extra time.

1. Week 1

   Sounds

   • ·Read how Mandarin works
   • ·Say the four tones out loud
   • ·Start a beginner course

   Chapter 1Chapter 2

2. Week 2

   Pinyin

   • ·Play through every sound
   • ·Learn the everyday tone changes
   • ·Keep the course going

   Chapter 2

3. Week 3

   Characters and first words

   • ·Learn twelve common parts
   • ·Start flashcards, ten new words a day

   Chapter 3Chapter 4

4. Week 4

   First sentences

   • ·Learn 是, 的 and 吗
   • ·Write five sentences of your own

   Open one Beginner story, and tap what you don’t know.

   Chapter 5

5. Week 5

   More patterns

   • ·Learn 了 and measure words
   • ·Finish the 180-word starter deck

   Chapter 4Chapter 5

6. Week 6

   Into HSK 3.0 level 1

   • ·Carry on through the HSK 3.0 level 1 deck
   • ·Read a short story twice this week

   Chapter 4

7. Week 7

   A reading habit

   • ·Keep your flashcards daily
   • ·Read a Beginner or Easy story most days

   Chapter 6

8. Week 8

   Check-in

   • ·Take the eight-sentence check
   • ·Choose your reading level

   Take the eight-sentence check and choose your level.

   Chapter 7

A 25-minute day

Fifteen minutes of flashcards, and ten of a beginner course or reading. Pick a time you can keep: with the morning coffee, on the commute, before bed. If 25 minutes is too much, make it 10.

One beginner course, for now

For the first weeks, a guided course gives you tone feedback and introduces characters and grammar in order. HelloChinese and SuperChinese are both good; Duolingo works if you already use it; an HSK 1 textbook works on a budget. Pick one. As short sentences start to feel easy, give more of your ten minutes to reading.

Missed days

Missed days are normal. Pick up where you left off, and don’t double the next session to make up for it. On a busy day, five minutes of review is enough.

What to expect

The first weeks are full of new ideas at once: tones, parts, patterns. Around weeks six to eight, you start to recognize common words without translating them, and you can read short sentences in one go. For some people this takes a few more weeks.

Eight weeks in, it is time to read something real. First, a quick check to see where you are. Then a story at a level that fits.

The eight-sentence check

Eight sentences, from easy to hard. Read them without a dictionary and without pinyin, and select every one you can read comfortably — not guess, read. Be strict with yourself; it makes the result more useful.

1. 我每天早上七点起床。
2. 今天比昨天冷多了，我们还是坐地铁去吧。
3. 虽然外面下着大雨，但是来看熊猫的人还是很多。
4. 一只鸵鸟跑到了马路上，几次差点被路过的车撞到。
5. 随着经济的发展，越来越多的年轻人选择离开家乡，到大城市工作。
6. 天文学家说，中秋节的月亮并不一定是最圆的，有时要到农历十七才是满月。
7. 由于在地下埋藏两千多年，又经历火烧和水土侵蚀，大部分兵马俑的原始彩绘已经消失。
8. 受人工智能技术发展的驱动，电子产品零部件需求激增，导致生产成本显著上涨。

What the result means

The first sentence is an everyday routine. After the starter deck, your course lessons and the five patterns, it should feel comfortable.

If it is the only one you can read, or you cannot read any yet, start with Dengdeng’s Beginner stories. They are short stories written around HSK 3.0 levels 1–2, with pinyin over every word, and one is free every day. Stopping at the first sentence after eight weeks is normal, and you do not need to wait before you start reading.

The second and third sentences add a comparison and an “although… still” sentence. Read those, and Easy fits: stories from China that stay close to HSK 3.0 levels 1–3. Comfortable through the sixth sentence, and Medium will fit. The last two come from real Hard stories; read those, and Hard will fit.

Your first real story

Beginner stories are about everyday things: food, family, school, travel, animals. Each day Dengdeng also publishes three stories from China every day, each written at Easy, Medium and Hard.

At every level, tap any word for its pinyin and meaning. The words you tap come back as flashcards and fill-in-the-blank sentences, in the same practice queue as your HSK deck.

For checking yourself afterwards, the eight sentences read: “I get up at seven every morning.” · “It’s much colder today than yesterday. Let’s take the subway.” · “Although it’s pouring outside, lots of people still came to see the pandas.” · “An ostrich ran out onto the road and was nearly hit by passing cars several times.” · “As the economy grows, more and more young people choose to leave their hometowns and work in big cities.” · “Astronomers say the Mid-Autumn moon is not always the fullest. Sometimes the full moon only comes on the 17th day of the lunar month.” · “Buried for more than two thousand years, then damaged by fire and by water and soil, most of the terracotta warriors have lost their original paint.” · “Driven by advances in artificial intelligence, demand for electronic components has surged, pushing production costs up sharply.”