Best Mandarin Chinese Resources

This is one of my favorite online courses which has some of the highest quality Mandarin dialogue material available.

Rocket Chinese doesn’t follow a ‘cookie cutter’ approach like other well-known programs such as Rosetta Stone or Pimsleur, and it has a tonne of excellent audio content for all levels ranging from beginner to advanced.

An extremely well-made and very unique Mandarin Chinese course aimed at teaching Chinese through a unique “story learning method”.

If you’re looking for a full Chinese curriculum that leads you all the way through to fluency, and are facing difficulties getting your head around how Chinese works, this will definitely help you.

This is an excellent Mandarin Chinese course in the form of audio podcasts and downloadable lessons.

As well as podcast-style lessons, you’ll find videos, a vocabulary database and dictionary, grammar explanations and various other useful features.

See ChineseClass101 review.

An amazing and extensive collection of high quality video lessons for Mandarin Chinese by Angel Huang.

I love the lesson delivery style which is succinct, clear and very easy to follow.

This great resource was put together by Yangyang Cheng, a famous YouTube personality known for her unique approach to teaching Mandarin Chinese.

Very popular and highly recommended.

This is an excellent site for using video to learn Mandarin where you can control the speed of playback and select words from the subtitles for definitions.

Yabla has recently had some major improvements and new video content added making it well worth a try.

This is a fantastic tool for learning Chinese using subtitled video (I wrote a FluentU review here).

It has many of the same features as Yabla but a wider array of video content to choose from.

Pimsleur is a household name and one of the most famous Mandarin Chinese courses ever made.

It’s a research-backed, proven method that is audio-only and gets you speaking quickly through spaced-repetition of situational phrases.

One of my personal favorites.

Read my Pimsleur review.

This is another very unique product that improves your fluency through a highly repetitive ‘listen and repeat’ approach.

It is, in my opinion, one of the the most useful tools I’ve seen for training Chinese listening comprehension (read my Glossika review). Definitely not a conventional course but you’ll be amazed at how effective it is at improving your fluency if you use it daily.

Available in both mainland and Taiwanese Mandarin.

ChinesePod is a massive library of high quality lessons for Mandarin Chinese on pretty much every topic you can think of. The video lessons are excellent and the hosts are really likeable.

Mandarin Blueprint is a trending, highly popular course for Chinese developed by two advanced Mandarin speakers (non-native).

Tons of high quality video content, unique methodology and native dialogues. Normally I’d hesitate to recommend a language course by non-native speakers but this one is well worth it.

See this Mandarin Blueprint review.

Not too long ago it was really difficult or impossible to practice Mandarin without actually traveling to China or Taiwan.

Thankfully, tools like italki have made it possible to connect with native speakers from all over the world to practice or to take personalized lessons over Skype.

The great news is, Chinese lessons over Skype through italki are incredibly cheap compared to most teachers in person. All the frustration of payments and scheduling is handled brilliantly by italki too which makes it very easy and stress free to arrange sessions.