Situation: You have just started learning Chinese or plan to do so in the near future. If you feel that you can already understand elementary Chinese and communicate on a basic level, I consider you to be an intermediate learner. I consider anything below CEFR B1 to be beginner level. On this page, I discuss how to learn Chinese as a beginner.
Goal: Be able to use Chinese to communicate with natives about yourself, your life, school, work, life and leisure or other things which aren’t strictly personal, but still related to your world of experience.
Here are some questions we will look at:
- I’m a beginner, how do I study Chinese?
- What should I do first? What can wait a bit?
- What indispensable tools and resources are there?
Before we look at the articles relevant for beginners, I’d like to recommend my free crash course for learning Chinese. It will gradually summarise and introduce to the most important things:
Below, I have selected seven particularly important things that beginners should pay attention to. After that follows a list of all beginner articles on Hacking Chinese.
1. Organise what you learn
One thing you should do as early as possible is to develop a system to keep track of what you learn. The best way of doing this is using what’s called spaced repetition software, which can be installed both on your computer and your phone. It might seem like a daunting task, but in order to learn Chinese, you not only have to learn new things all the time, you also have to remember what you have already studied. I suggest Anki (free) for this in general, but if you want a program specifically geared towards learning to write characters, I suggest Skritter. If you are taking a course in Chinese, it sometimes isn’t required of you to remember what you did two months ago, but this is vital if you have any serious plans of learning the language! Schools and teachers seldom test everything you need to know.
2. Avoid perfectionism
You’ve just set out on a journey of a thousand miles, so the important thing isn’t to make every step perfect, but to keep moving. Avoid aiming for 100%, 90% is usually enough (except for pronunciation), the important thing is that you’re moving with a purpose and a goal. The reason why perfectionism isn’t good for you is that you will end up spending huge amounts of time gaining those few last percentage points. You should instead spend this time learning other things and expanding your horizons. It’s more efficient to perfect something once your level is considerably higher than it is now.
3. Start looking for learning outside the classroom
Your textbook might be the best on the market and your teacher the coolest guy around, but you should start looking for secondary language sources from the very start. If possible, find native speakers, but there are also loads of computer software, radio shows, film clips on YouTube and so on, to help you get started. I suggest checking out a beginner-friendly podcast immediately (I used ChinesePod). Buying an extra textbook might also be a good idea, but remember that you shouldn’t read that one to learn everything, just to see things from another angle. Finally, you should start using Chinese to communicate immediately. Don’t isolate yourself in the classroom.
4. Find friends for help and cooperation
To start with, allying yourself with a fellow student is a good idea, but this isn’t specific for studying Chinese. Having somebody on the same ambition level as yourself can be an incredible boost to your learning speed. Furthermore, at some point you want to find native speakers to actually help you develop quicker. It’s very easy to find Chinese people online who want to learn English, so if you can’t find anything else, this might be a good idea (be careful, though, just because they are native speakers doesn’t mean their Chinese is perfect). The best way is of course to find native speakers who you can meet and make friends with in the usual manner. I’ve found that an explicit language-based relationship (language exchange) is sometimes preferable, but to each his own.
5. Embrace that which is distinctively Chinese
Regardless if you have studied other foreign languages before, Chinese presents some unique challenges (I even have a special category with articles about this). The most important thing of all is to understand that your attitude affects your learning. If you think Chinese is weird and stupid, you will start hating it, making it very unlikely that your learning will be either enjoyable or effective (these are intimately connected). You should instead open your mind and embrace the uniqueness of the Chinese language. Learning Chinese is definitely possible, but don’t make it harder than it already is by adopting the wrong attitude. Depending on how you look at it, Chinese is sometimes really easy!
6. Examine your goals and motivations
Why do you want to learn Chinese? Do you have any specific plans for how to use the language in the future? These are very, very important questions you should keep on asking yourself, because your learning strategy is intimately related to the answers to those questions. For instance, if your goal is to be able to travel in China and chat with Chinese people, learning to write five thousand characters by hand is a waste of time, but on the other hand, if you plan to teach Chinese, you probably have no choice. You have to know what you want in order to achieve it. You also have to know what you want in order to be able to evaluate if your studying method is working.
7. Enjoy yourself
This is not a cliche to make you feel good, but rather a serious word of warning. Make sure that you like what you are doing, regardless of whether it’s language exchange with a native speaker, listening to audio lessons or writing characters. If you don’t enjoy yourself, you will never master Chinese (or any other language for that matter). The project ahead of you requires an insane amount of time to accomplish and if you don’t enjoy it, you will never be able to invest the amount of time and energy required. So, try different ways, find whatever strategy seems to work best for you and go with it. Good luck!
Unlocking Chinese
If you think all of this is/looks helpful, but want a more comprehensive and structure approach, I offer a course aimed at beginners, called Unlocking Chinese: The Ultimate Guide for Beginners. You can find more information about the course here:
Unlocking Chinese: The Ultimate Guide for Beginners
The articles in this category
If you’ve only studied for while or haven’t even started yet, these articles are for you. In short, they will tell you things that I wished someone had told me when I was at this level, but no-one ever did and I only found out on my own much later. Many of these articles will be useful to intermediate students as well.
- Hacking Chinese Pronunciation: Speaking with Confidence is now open!
- Chinese translation challenge, August 2022
- Hacking Chinese Podcast two-year anniversary Q&A
- How to learn Chinese characters as a beginner
- 7 ways to write Mandarin tones
- Chinese language question triage: When to ask whom about what
- Chinese reading challenge, November 2022
- How to become fluent in Chinese
- How to learn from your mistakes and errors when learning Chinese
- Do you have to learn to write Chinese characters by hand?
- Chinese vocabulary challenge, December 2022
- Why you should use more than one Chinese textbook
- Analyse and balance your Chinese learning with Paul Nation’s four strands
- On accuracy, communication and comprehensibility when learning Chinese
- Chinese listening challenge, September 2022
- How to learn Chinese pronunciation as a beginner
- Chinese speaking challenge, April 2022
- Time quality: Studying the right thing at the right time
- 500 resources for learning and teaching Chinese, tagged by level, topic and type
- How to survive and thrive in a difficult Chinese course
- Is taking a Chinese course that’s too hard good for your learning?
- Chinese writing challenge, February 2022
- Best of Hacking Chinese 2021
- A guide to Pinyin traps and pitfalls: Learning Mandarin pronunciation
- How to improve fluency in Chinese by playing word games
- The building blocks of Chinese, part 6: Learning and remembering compound words
- The building blocks of Chinese, part 5: Making sense of Chinese words
- Why spaced repetition software is uniquely well suited to learning Chinese characters
- The 7 best Chinese reading resources for beginners
- 6 challenges students face when learning to read Chinese and how to overcome them
- Should you enrol in a Chinese course or are you better off learning on your own?
- Why your Chinese isn’t as good as you think it ought to be
- The building blocks of Chinese, part 4: Learning and remembering compound characters
- The building blocks of Chinese, part 3: Compound characters
- Using voice messaging as a stepping stone to Chinese conversations
- A smart method to discover problems with Mandarin sounds and tones
- The building blocks of Chinese, part 2: Basic characters, components and radicals
- The building blocks of Chinese, part 1: Chinese characters and words in a nutshell
- Skritter review: Boosting your Chinese character learning (2021 edition)
- Chinese pronunciation challenge, October 2022
- Hacking Chinese Podcast one-year anniversary Q&A
- Chinese language logging, part 3: Tools and resources for keeping track of your learning
- Chinese language learning in the twenty-first century: Towards a digital ecosystem?
- The new HSK 3.0 (2021): What you need to know
- Learning to understand regionally accented Mandarin
- The importance of tones is inversely proportional to the predictability of what you say
- Lost in transcription: Saylaw, Ice Island and Aristotle
- Chinese language logging, part 2: A healthy, balanced diet of Mandarin
- Chinese language logging, part 1: Why and how to track your progress
- What’s the difference between Chinese pronunciation and Pinyin? Does it matter?
- Learning the second tone in Mandarin Chinese
- Chinese input methods: A guide for second language learners
- The 10 best free Chinese reading resources for beginner, intermediate and advanced learners
- 6 things in Chinese that are harder to learn than they seem
- My best advice on how to learn Chinese characters
- 20 tips and tricks to improve your Chinese writing ability
- Learning the third tone in Mandarin Chinese
- The most serious mistake students make when learning Mandarin pronunciation
- Best of Hacking Chinese 2020
- How to not fail with your New Year resolution to learn Chinese
- 7 things Chinese students should do during the winter vacation
- 9 answers to questions about Pinyin and pronunciation
- An introduction to extensive reading for Chinese learners
- Review: Learning Chinese by video immersion with FluentU (2020 edition)
- Why learning Chinese pronunciation by using English words is a really bad idea
- 7 ideas for smooth and effortless Chinese listening practice
- Should you learn the names of the strokes in Chinese characters?
- How to not teach Chinese characters to beginners: A 12-step approach
- Why not going to China now could actually be good for your Chinese
- The key to unlocking your first semester of Chinese
- Review: The Outlier Linguistics Dictionary of Chinese Characters
- All the resources you need to learn and teach Chinese stroke order
- Diversify how you study Chinese to learn more
- Improving your Chinese while watching TV shows
- Training your Chinese teacher, part 4: Writing ability
- Should you learn to speak Chinese before you learn Chinese characters?
- How to get honest feedback to boost your Chinese speaking and writing
- Are mnemonics too slow for Chinese learners?
- Learning Chinese words: When quantity beats quality
- When spaced repetition fails, and what to do about it
- Chinese is fascinating and exciting, not weird and stupid
- How to figure out how good your Chinese is
- The simple trick I used to double the amount of Chinese I listen to
- 5 levels of understanding Chinese characters: Superficial forms to deep structure
- The forking path: A human approach to learning Chinese
- Does using colour to represent Mandarin tones make them easier to learn?
- How important is reading speed on tests like HSK and TOCFL?
- How to look up Chinese characters you don’t know
- Can too much guidance make you learn less Chinese?
- Why is listening in Chinese so hard?
- Training your Chinese teacher, part 3: Listening ability
- Two types of pronunciation problems and what to do about them
- New course: Unlocking Chinese – The Ultimate Guide for Beginners
- The nine principles of learning (and the mistakes from failing to follow them)
- Review: Mandarin Companion: Easy to read novels in Chinese
- 101 questions and answers about how to learn Chinese
- The most common Chinese words, characters and components for language learners and teachers
- 7 things you were taught in Chinese class that are actually wrong
- How good is voice recognition for learning Chinese pronunciation?
- The cheapest and most convenient way to improve your spoken Chinese
- Using speech recognition to improve Chinese pronunciation, part 1
- Training your Chinese teacher, part 2: Speaking ability
- The beginner’s guide to Chinese translation
- Tone errors in Mandarin that actually can cause misunderstandings
- Why using a good dictionary can be bad for your Chinese reading ability
- Free and easy audio flashcards for Chinese dictation practice with Anki
- Reading is a lot like spaced repetition, only better
- Training your Chinese teacher, part 1: Introduction
- Review: Language Empowerment: Demystify Chinese culture and fire up your Mandarin + interview with the author
- 36 samples of Chinese handwriting from students and native speakers
- How to improve your Chinese handwriting
- The Hacking Chinese guide to Mandarin tones
- Focusing on Mandarin tones without being distracted by Pinyin
- Cramming vs. spaced repetition: When to use which method to learn Chinese
- Learning Chinese as an introverted student
- Learning to unicycle, learning anatomy and learning Chinese
- Five text games for Chinese learners
- Should you focus on learning Chinese words or phrases?
- Vocabulary lists that help you learn Chinese and how to use them
- Should you learn Chinese vocabulary from lists?
- Training and testing your ability to hear Mandarin sounds
- Is it necessary to learn the stroke order of Chinese characters?
- Get to know your own Chinese voice
- Task based Chinese learning and teaching
- How long do you have to study Chinese to make it useful?
- Learning (or not learning) Chinese slang
- Playing Codenames to learn Chinese
- How narrow listening and reading can help you learn Chinese
- Comprehension-based listening vs deep end immersion
- 8 great ways to scaffold your Chinese learning
- 10 ways of using games to learn and teach Chinese
- A student’s guide to comprehension-based learning
- The benefits of a comprehension-based approach for teaching and learning Chinese
- An introduction to comprehension-based Chinese teaching and learning
- How to fake sounding like a native Chinese speaker
- Spaced repetition is not limited to flashcards
- Looking up how to use words in Chinese the right way
- Why you should preview before every Chinese lesson
- Three factors that decide how much Chinese you learn
- Obligatory and optional tone change rules in Mandarin
- Learn Chinese implicitly through exposure with a seasoning of explicit instruction
- Mimicking native speakers as a way of learning Chinese
- 7 kinds of tone problems and what to do about them
- Learning Chinese by playing board games
- Overcoming the problem of having too many Chinese words to learn
- Learning to read handwritten Chinese
- Transcribing Chinese audio as an active form of listening practice
- Escape: A text adventure game for Chinese learners
- Are you practising Chinese the right way? Is your method valid?
- Don’t forget to consolidate the Chinese you have already studied
- The best Twitter feeds for learning Chinese in 2016
- Why you should start blogging in Chinese today
- How technology can stop you from learning Chinese
- How technology can help you learn Chinese
- Which Chinese language course should you take?
- I have published a book!
- Should you learn the pronunciation of radicals?
- Learning Chinese through comprehensible input
- ChinesePod review: Your companion to Mandarin fluency
- What your Chinese course will not teach you
- Learn Chinese character meaning and pronunciation together
- Listen before you read: Improve your listening ability
- Can you use English learning materials to study Chinese?
- Learning tones in Mandarin is not optional
- Are there any shortcuts for learning Chinese?
- The Hacking Chinese tone training course
- Learning to hear the sounds and tones in Mandarin
- How to verify that you use the right Chinese font
- Chinese character variants and fonts for language learners
- Which words you should learn and where to find them
- Can native speakers be wrong about Chinese grammar and pronunciation?
- Learning Chinese characters through pictures
- Zooming out: The resources you need to put Chinese in context
- Zooming in: The tools you need to break down and understand Chinese
- Chinese learning tools and resources worth paying for
- Why you should read Chinese on your phone
- Learning to pronounce Mandarin with Pinyin, Zhuyin and IPA: Part 2
- Learning to pronounce Mandarin with Pinyin, Zhuyin and IPA: Part 1
- Why you should learn Chinese in Chinese
- Review: Mandarin Companion graded readers (Level 1)
- The best Twitter feeds for learning Chinese in 2015
- Learning Chinese by playing Mahjong 麻將 (májiàng)
- Will a Chinese-only rule improve your learning?
- Using Chinese textbooks to improve reading ability
- How to adjust your Chinese listening to the right level
- Three steps to more and better Chinese listening practice
- What you intend to write is more important than the character you actually write
- How learning some basic theory can improve your pronunciation
- 24 great resources for improving your Mandarin pronunciation
- How to find a suitable Chinese name
- Focus on initials and finals, not Pinyin spelling
- How knowing your best performance in Chinese can help you improve
- Is Chinese difficult to learn?
- How to find the time and motivation to read more Chinese
- Learning how to ask for and receive directions in Chinese
- The 10 best free listening resource collections for learning Chinese
- Launching Hacking Chinese Challenges
- Learning to write Chinese characters through communication
- Focusing on communication to learn Chinese
- Change your attitude to enjoy life and learn more Chinese
- How long have you studied Chinese? 290 years or 58 992 hours!
- About cheating, spaced repetition and learning Chinese
- Study more Chinese: Time boxing vs. micro goals
- 7 ways of learning to write Chinese characters
- How long have you studied Chinese?
- Is speaking more important than listening when learning Chinese?
- Focusing on radicals, character components and building blocks
- Improve your pronunciation with the Hacking Chinese pronunciation check
- Language learning with a Chinese girlfriend or boyfriend
- A learner’s guide to TV shows in Chinese, part 2
- Sensible character learning challenge 2014: The Big Finish
- How to reach a decent level of Chinese in 100 days
- How and why to watch the world cup in Chinese
- Launching Hacking Chinese Resources
- A learner’s guide to TV shows in Chinese, part 1
- Sensible character learning challenge 2014: Milestone #3
- How and why to use television to learn Chinese
- How to find out how good your Chinese pronunciation really is
- How to Approach Chinese Grammar
- Sensible character learning challenge 2014: Milestone #2
- Handwriting Chinese characters: The minimum requirements
- Learn to read Chinese… with ease?
- The grand listening cycle: Improve your Chinese listening ability
- Three ways to improve the way you review Chinese characters
- Sensible character learning challenge 2014: Milestone #1
- Why good feedback matters and how to get it
- Sensible Chinese character learning challenge 2014
- Sensible Chinese character learning revisited
- Asking the experts: How to learn Chinese grammar
- Flashcard overflow: About card models and review directions
- Learning how to fish: Or, why it’s essential to know how to learn
- Two reasons why pronunciation matters more than you think
- Habit hacking for language learners
- Focusing on tone pairs to improve your Mandarin pronunciation
- Wuxia, a key to Chinese language and culture
- Chinese reading challenge: Read more or die
- Chinese immersion with Carl Gene Fordham
- Role-playing to learn more Chinese and avoid frustration
- Review: The Geography of Thought: How East Asians and Westerners Think Differently… And Why
- Improving your spoken and written Chinese by focusing on the process
- Asking the experts: How to bridge the gap to real Chinese
- Preparing for rainy days and dealing with slumps
- Your slumps affect your language learning more than your flows
- What’s your next step to master Chinese?
- 5 websites to help answer your questions about Chinese
- Reading aloud in Chinese is really hard
- Phonetic components, part 2: Hacking Chinese characters
- Phonetic components, part 1: The key to 80% of all Chinese characters
- Why manually adding and editing flashcards is good for you
- Why you need goals to learn Chinese efficiently
- Do you really know how to count in Chinese?
- How to get good grades when studying Chinese
- The get-back-up-to-speed summer challenge
- Role-playing as a way to expand your Chinese
- If you think spaced repetition software is a panacea you are wrong
- Learning how to learn Chinese through self-experimentation
- Using Audacity to learn Chinese (speaking and listening)
- Adding tone marks (w/o Pinyin) above characters to practise tones
- You might be too lazy to learn Chinese, but you’re not too old
- Immersion at home or: Why you don’t have to go abroad to learn Chinese
- Learning the right chengyu the right way
- The question you have to ask about your Chinese teacher or course
- You shouldn’t walk the road to Chinese fluency alone
- 14 extra songs to learn Chinese and expand your horizons
- 21 essential dictionaries and corpora for learning Chinese
- Horizontal vocabulary learning in Chinese
- The Cthulhu bubble and studying Chinese
- Don’t use mnemonics for everything
- How to create mnemonics for general or abstract character components
- Sensible character learning: Progress, reminders and reflections
- Remembering is a skill you can learn
- Towards a more sensible way of learning to write Chinese
- You can’t learn Chinese characters by rote
- Why you really should use a Chinese notebook
- Measuring your language learning is a double-edged sword
- Have fun learning Chinese or else…
- 13 more songs to learn Chinese and expand your horizons
- Learning Chinese in the shower with me
- Chat your way to better Chinese
- Learning styles: Use with caution!
- Vocalise more to learn more Chinese
- Don’t just read about language learning methods, try them!
- 12 songs to learn Chinese and expand your horizons
- Extending mnemonics: Tones and pronunciation
- The time barrel: How to find more time to study Chinese
- Kickstart your Chinese character learning with the 100 most common radicals
- Study according to your current productivity level
- Why learning Chinese through music is underrated
- 31 Twitter feeds to help you learn Chinese
- A language learner’s guide to reading comics in Chinese
- Recording yourself to improve your Chinese speaking ability
- Chinese Language Learner Interview Series – Olle Linge
- Chinese listening strategies: Deliberate practice and i+2
- Chinese listening strategies: Improving listening speed
- Language is communication, not only an abstract subject to study
- Chinese listening strategies: Active listening
- Using Lang-8 to improve your Chinese
- Playing computer games in Chinese: Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2
- Chinese listening strategies: Passive listening
- Practising sports to learn Chinese and make friends
- Chinese listening strategies: Background listening
- Chinese listening strategies: Problem analysis
- Chinese listening strategies: An introduction
- Don’t try to improve everything at once, limit your focus
- Answer buttons and how to use SRS to study Chinese
- Defining Language Hacking: Lessons Learned From Hacking Chinese
- The importance of counting what counts when learning Chinese
- The 10,000 hour rule – Blood, sweat and tears
- Use the benefits of teaching to boost your own Chinese learning
- When perfectionism becomes an obstacle to progress
- Making progress in Chinese in spite of praise
- Learning simplified and traditional Chinese
- Learning Chinese efficiently vs. learning quickly
- Learn by exaggerating: Slow, then fast; big, then small
- Can you become fluent in Chinese in three months?
- If you want to master Chinese, make long-term investments
- The tones in Mandarin are more important than you think
- About opening doors and the paths beyond
- Time boxing Chinese: Get more done in less time
- Enjoying the journey while focusing on the destination
- Learning Chinese the holistic way: Integrating knowledge
- Achieving the impossible by being inspired
- Don’t be a tourist if you want to learn Chinese language and culture
- How to find more time to practise Chinese listening
- Growing up in Chinese as a foreign adult
- Using memory aids and mnemonics to make Chinese easier
- Chinese vocabulary in your pocket
- Dealing with tricky vocabulary: Killing leeches
- Escaping the convenience trap to learn more Chinese
- Spaced repetition isn’t rote learning
- You won’t learn Chinese simply by living abroad
- Goals and motivation for learning Chinese, part 4 – Micro goals
- Goals and motivation for learning Chinese, part 3 – Short-term goals
- Goals and motivation for learning Chinese, part 2 – Long-term goals
- Goals and motivation for learning Chinese, part 1 – Introduction
- Anki, the best of spaced repetition software
- Take responsibility for your Chinese learning now
- Pros and cons with travelling to learn a language
- Chinese listening ability, a matter of practice?
- Spaced repetition software and why you should use it
- The virtues of learning Chinese through language exchange
- Learning Chinese through social media
- Making mistakes in Chinese is necessary to adjust your mental models
- Learning Chinese is easier than you think