The Best Way to Learn Chinese Online

The best way to learn Chinese online is to follow one structured course, get your tones checked early, review characters with spaced repetition, listen and read a lot at your level, and speak every week with a teacher who corrects you. Everything else, from apps to YouTube, is useful on top of that.

When online study stalls, the usual cause is missing feedback on speaking: tones that nobody checked in the first month, or months of reading and app work with very little talking.

We are the Chinese Language Institute (CLI). We teach Chinese in Guilin and online, so we have a view on this, and one of the options below is ours. For how individual tools work on your memory, see our guide to what actually helps when learning Chinese online.

01What Works When You Study Chinese Online

These are the five things we would put in place first, roughly in this order. None of them depends on a particular app or website.

Follow One Structured Path

Chinese builds on itself quickly. Tones and pinyin come first, then a few hundred common words and the basic word order, then characters and reading. A course or a textbook puts these in a sensible order, so you aren't stitching together videos and guessing what comes next. Pick one path and finish its first level before you look for another, because switching resources every few weeks is the easiest way to feel busy without moving.

Get Tones and Pinyin Right Early, With Feedback

Almost every Mandarin syllable has a tone, and the tone is part of the word: 妈 (mā) means "mother" and 马 (mǎ) means "horse." Pinyin is the spelling in the Latin alphabet that shows the sound and the tone, and you will need it to type Chinese and to look words up. The difficulty is that you can't easily hear your own tone mistakes. Recording yourself and comparing with a native recording helps. A teacher who hears a wrong tone and says the word back to you correctly, without stopping the conversation, helps more. In a 2020 study by Bryfonski and Ma of adult beginners taking one-on-one lessons online, that kind of correction (called a recast) improved their tone production more than explicit explanations did. It is also far easier to fix a tone in your second week than in your second year.

Learn Characters With Spaced Repetition

A character doesn't spell out its sound, so each one has to be remembered. Spaced repetition flashcards show you a word again shortly before you are likely to forget it, which makes ten minutes a day go a long way. Anki and Pleco schedule your reviews this way, and our free HSK vocabulary flashcards can be downloaded as an Anki deck. Say or write the word before you flip the card; recognizing it on sight is the weaker kind of practice.

Listen and Read a Lot at Your Level

This is called comprehensible input: Chinese you can mostly follow, with only a few new words on each page or in each minute. Reading and listening like this is how you learn to understand words at normal speed without translating each one. For a beginner that means graded readers written for learners and slow podcasts, with short subtitled videos once those feel easy. Native TV and news come later, because at the start they are mostly noise.

Speak Every Week With Someone Who Corrects You

You only learn to speak by speaking, and online it is the part that is easiest to put off. A teacher hears what you actually said and explains why it was wrong, and the next lesson changes because of it. A language-exchange partner is good practice as well, but most partners can tell you that a sentence sounds odd without being able to tell you why, so we would add one once you can hold a simple conversation.

The research points the same way. Benjamin Bloom's well-known 1984 paper reported that the average student taught by a tutor, with frequent tests and correction before moving on, scored higher than 98% of students in a conventional class. Later studies put the advantage of tutoring much lower, though still meaningful, and suggest that much of it comes from those frequent checks and quick correction. Our article on the 2 sigma problem in language learning goes through the studies.

02Apps, Courses, Tutors or a School: The Options Compared

You will probably use two or three of these together. Here is what each does well, what it can't do, and roughly what it costs.

Language Apps

Apps make it easy to start and to keep a daily habit, which counts for a lot in the first months. HelloChinese was built for Chinese and handles tones and character writing well. Duolingo is good for building a routine and core beginner vocabulary, and Skritter is the one to use if you want to practice handwriting. Several apps now add AI chat practice, which is useful, but they still can't reliably hear and correct your tones the way a teacher does in conversation. Use an app for 10 to 15 minutes a day alongside a course, and don't count your streak as speaking practice.

Free Courses

A good free course gives you the structure that apps lack. Our free Chinese course is six short lessons with recordings, from the four tones to three graded stories, and takes about two hours in sittings of 15 to 30 minutes, with nothing to sign up for. University Mandarin courses on Coursera and edX go further at a more academic pace. Most edX courses can be audited for free for a limited time, and Coursera offers a free preview or trial.

Video and Podcast Courses

ChinesePod, Yoyo Chinese and similar courses explain grammar and pronunciation clearly and let you replay a point as often as you need. They can't hear you, so use them as your textbook and find speaking practice elsewhere. Our guide to Chinese podcasts has more, sorted by level.

Tutor Marketplaces

Sites such as italki and Preply let you choose a tutor from profiles and book around your own schedule, at prices each tutor sets. Good tutors there are very good. The catch is that you vet the tutor yourself, whether you get a lesson plan depends on who you pick, and changing tutors often means explaining your level and goals all over again.

Schools With One-on-One Online Teachers

A school matches you with a teacher, keeps a plan for you and coordinates scheduling across time zones. The trade-off is less choice than on a marketplace, and you may pay more per hour than for its cheapest tutors. That is how our own one-on-one online lessons work, with qualified teachers based in Guilin, China, and a free 30-minute trial first.

Self-Study Tools

These fill the hours between lessons. Pleco is the standard dictionary app, and you can look up a character by drawing it. For reading, our graded readers, Du Chinese, The Chairman's Bao and the Mandarin Companion books are all written at set levels. For listening there are our guides to YouTube channels for Mandarin and Chinese TV shows. Once you can introduce yourself and ask simple questions, language-exchange apps such as HelloTalk and Tandem give you people to talk to. Our Chinese learning resources page lists more tools we recommend.

03The Best Mix for Your Goal and Budget

How much of each you use depends on what you want Chinese for and how many hours you have in a week.

Free, 15 to 30 Minutes a Day

Work through the free course, then keep going with the HSK 1 word list and its flashcards, one graded reader a week and a podcast on your commute. You can learn to read and understand a fair amount this way. Your speaking will lag behind, so talk to someone now and then; a friend or a language partner counts.

You Want to Hold Conversations

Take one or two lessons a week with a teacher and do 20 to 30 minutes of review on the days in between. Lessons stick when you review between them. One reviewer on Go Overseas looked back on years of studying "at a slow pace (1 hour lesson per week, and not doing much homework!)" before trying an immersion program.

You Are Preparing for the HSK

Follow the word list and a textbook for your HSK level, drill the vocabulary with flashcards and do timed listening and reading practice. Use a teacher to check your speaking and writing and to explain the grammar points you keep getting wrong, since those are the parts you can't grade yourself.

You Are Planning to Study in China

Online lessons before you go mean you arrive able to follow more of what you hear, so your first weeks in China go further. Many students use online study as a stepping stone to our Immersion Program in Guilin.

For the next step after any of these, our Chinese study plan sets out what to learn first and how to use 3, 8 or 20+ hours a week, and our guide to how long it takes to learn Chinese gives realistic timelines.

Start Free, Then Talk to a Teacher

Our free Chinese course takes about two hours and needs no sign-up. When you want someone to hear your tones, book a free 30-minute lesson with one of our teachers in Guilin.

Start the Free Course Book a Free Lesson

04A Free First Month, Week by Week

If you are starting from zero, this is a month you can begin today without paying anything. It uses our free course and tools, but the same plan works with any good course.

1. Week 1: tones and pinyin. Do lessons 1 and 2 of the free course, then repeat them on another day, because tones settle with sleep and a second pass. Use the pinyin chart to hear any syllable you're unsure of.
2. Week 2: first words and characters. Do lessons 3 and 4, and start the HSK 1 flashcards at ten new words a day.
3. Week 3: sentences and stories. Do lessons 5 and 6, then listen to the three graded stories again without reading along.
4. Week 4: say it to someone. Keep up the flashcards, read the next graded reader and book a free trial lesson, so a teacher can hear your tones and tell you what to work on next.

05What to Look For in a Trial Lesson

Whether you try a marketplace tutor or a school, a first lesson tells you most of what you need to know. These are the things we would watch for.

• Your teacher corrects your tones while you speak, and you leave knowing which ones you get wrong.
• Most of the lesson is in Chinese you can follow, with clear explanations when you are stuck on a grammar point.
• You talk for a good share of the time, and the teacher doesn't fill it with a lecture.
• You leave with a plan: what to review, what the next lesson covers, and how often to meet.
• The lesson times still suit your time zone a month later.

If you want to try ours, CLI Online offers a free 30-minute trial with one of our teachers in Guilin. Our guides to finding the right online Chinese teacher, taking Chinese lessons on Zoom and private lessons versus group classes go into more detail.

06 Key Terms You Will Meet as a Beginner

These words come up in textbooks and lessons. You don't need to learn them all now; the table is here to come back to.

For pronunciation, start with our guide to what pinyin is and the interactive pinyin chart. For how sentences fit together, see the Chinese grammar guide.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

• U.S. Department of State, George P. Shultz National Foreign Affairs Training Center (the Foreign Service Institute until 2025): language learning timelines for English speakers, with Mandarin in Category IV at 88 weeks (2,200 class hours). View source →
• Bloom, B. S. (1984). "The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring." Educational Researcher, 13(6), 4–16.
• Bryfonski, L., & Ma, X. (2020). "Effects of Implicit Versus Explicit Corrective Feedback on Mandarin Tone Acquisition in a SCMC Learning Environment." Studies in Second Language Acquisition. View study →