19 topics
Mandarin Chinese help with tones, characters and grammar
Two third tones in a row are not pronounced as two third tones. Nǐ hǎo comes out as ní hǎo, and nobody mentions this until you have already learned the syllables wrong. Tone sandhi, measure words, and the two completely different jobs of the particle le are where Mandarin students stall, and none of them are fixed by more vocabulary drilling.
Where students get stuck
My tones are right one at a time and wrong in sentences
That is tone sandhi, and it is a rule rather than sloppiness. When two third tones meet, the first becomes a second tone: nǐ hǎo is said ní hǎo, wǒ hěn hǎo is said wó hén hǎo. Bù shifts to bú before a fourth tone: bú shì, bú yào. Yī shifts to yì before first, second and third tones and to yí before a fourth: yì tiān, yí gè. The written pinyin usually keeps the original tone marks, so the page and the sound genuinely disagree and you have to apply the shift yourself.
Measure words seem arbitrary and I default to gè
Gè is the safety net, but the measure word carries meaning, so defaulting costs marks. They mostly group by shape and handling. Zhāng is for flat things: paper, tables, tickets, beds. Tiáo is for long flexible things: fish, roads, trousers, rivers. Běn is for bound volumes. Zhī is for one of a pair or small animals. Jiàn is for matters and items of clothing. Bǎ is for things with a handle. Learn each new noun with its measure word attached, the way you would learn gender in French, rather than as a separate list.
I cannot tell what le is doing in a sentence
There are two different le. Verb-le sits right after the verb and marks a completed action: wǒ chī le fàn, I ate. Sentence-le sits at the end and marks a change of state or new situation: xià yǔ le means it has started raining. The second one is why tā hěn gāo le does not mean he is tall, it means he has got tall. Le is not a past tense marker, which is the assumption that causes most of the trouble — wǒ míngtiān chī le fàn jiù zǒu refers to tomorrow.
Characters will not stick no matter how many times I copy them
Copying whole characters is rote work with no structure to hang on to. Characters decompose into components, usually a radical that hints at meaning and a phonetic that hints at sound. The water radical appears in hé, hǎi and hé for river, sea and drink. The speech radical runs through shuō, huà and yǔ. Learn the two hundred or so common radicals first, then meet each character as a combination of parts you already know. Stroke order matters too, because it governs how a character is looked up and how it looks when written quickly.
Word order and the bǎ construction confuse me
Mandarin is strict about order in ways English is not. Time goes before the verb, not after it: wǒ míngtiān qù, literally I tomorrow go. Place goes before the verb as well, with zài. The bǎ construction moves the object in front of the verb to say what was done to it, and it only works when something definite was affected or shifted: wǒ bǎ shū fàng zài zhuōzi shàng. You cannot use bǎ with a verb that does nothing to the object, which is why bǎ with kànjiàn or xǐhuān is wrong.
What's covered
Mandarin Chinese topics you can work through with a tutor, generate practice on, or turn into flashcards and a study plan.
Sound system
- Pinyin initials, finals and the tricky pairs zh/j, q/ch and x/sh
- The four tones and the neutral tone
- Tone sandhi rules for third tone, bù and yī
- Listening discrimination between similar syllables
Characters and writing
- Stroke order and the basic strokes
- Common radicals and what they signal
- Phonetic components and character families
- Simplified and traditional forms
- Typing Chinese with a pinyin input method
Grammar
- Measure words with nouns and numbers
- Aspect particles le, guo and zhe
- Time and place phrases before the verb
- The bǎ construction and the bèi passive
- Comparisons with bǐ, and resultative complements
- Question forms: ma, ne, and the verb-not-verb pattern
Course tasks
- Dialogue memorisation and role play
- Short compositions in characters
- Reading passages without pinyin support
- HSK-style listening and reading sections
Mandarin Chinese questions
Can it hear whether my tones are wrong?
It is a live voice conversation, so you speak Mandarin and it responds in Mandarin, and it can tell you when a word came out as a different word. What it is not is a pronunciation meter — there is no tone score or waveform display, just a tutor that will say that sounded like mài rather than mǎi and have you try it again.
I can read pinyin but characters terrify me. Where do I start?
With radicals rather than whole characters. Flashcards built around components let you meet a new character as parts you already recognise, and the Visual Explainer can break a character down stroke by stroke on the whiteboard. Most students find the wall stops being a wall once about a hundred radicals are familiar.
Can I hold my textbook up to the camera if the characters are not typeable?
Yes, and for Mandarin that is usually faster than typing. Hold the page up or share your screen and the tutor reads the characters off it, then works through the sentence on the whiteboard. Looking up an unknown character by radical and stroke count just to ask a question is a real barrier, and this skips it.
I speak Mandarin at home but cannot read or write it. Is this the wrong fit?
It is a common situation and it needs a different plan from a beginner course. Your listening and speaking are ahead, so the work is characters, formal register, and the written grammar you never needed at the dinner table. Sessions can run entirely in Mandarin while still starting from the first hundred characters.
Stuck on mandarin chinese right now?
Talk it through out loud, share your screen, and watch it worked out step by step on a whiteboard.
Start free — no card