Chinese from scratch!

Decided to learn Chinese?

Undoubtedly, one of your goals is worthy of respect, because this is one of the oldest and most complex languages. Mandarin Chinese is spoken by about 1,000 million people, while English, although more widely spoken, is spoken by about 400 million people.

Lingust will help you start the “great silk” way of learning Chinese for free. All you need is great Chinese patience, because the task before you is not an easy one.

The online lessons are based on a Chinese tutorial translated by A.F. Kondrashevsky and others. The author of the introductory lesson is T.P. Zadoenko. These materials are enhanced with supporting information and animations to make them easier to remember.

 

Lessons are provided with audio materials. Under the exercises, you will also find answer keys. To view the answer, hover your mouse over the key: Key. You can peep in response only after you complete the exercise or part of it! If you have any questions, you can ask them under the lesson in the form of a comment. However, it requires you to have a great desire to learn Chinese, because it has nothing to do with Western languages, and you can quickly lose the desire. In addition to incomprehensible hieroglyphs, a system of tones plays a special moment. You will read about this later. To memorize hieroglyphs, you may need a notebook for writing hieroglyphs the way you did it in the first grade in Russian, or electronic gadgets, but this will be discussed in more detail in the lessons.

For a more correct display of hieroglyphs, install Adobe Kaiti Std R and SimSun fonts. If you do not have them in your system, download the archive, unpack it, then copy the file, go to “Control Panel – Fonts”, paste the font there. Check that it has appeared in text editors. It might be worth restarting your computer.

Key Chinese characters

First, they are used in dictionaries. Secondly, you need to know them, because. they are found in complex hieroglyphs. The Chinese memorize the whole character, having a good visual memory. It is very difficult for us, so we have to memorize by traits, groups of traits. Knowing the key features, remembering hieroglyphs will become easier.

Comments on hieroglyphs are taken from A.P. Mytsik’s book “214 key hieroglyphs”. The book also has pictures that will help with memorizing hieroglyphs.

Complete with female and male voices

All of our grammar—and every Chinese character—is accompanied by male and female voices. Automatic audio playback while studying to develop listening comprehension of Chinese. Switch between male and female voices on the fly as you study.
Simplified and traditional character support

Switch between Simplified and Traditional characters depending on which character set you’re learning, or turn off Traditional characters entirely in the settings if you don’t need them.

Step by step grammar lessons

Expand your Chinese language skills with small grammar sections adapted to your level of knowledge. Explore our collection of thousands of example sentences illustrating the use of Chinese grammar, from HSK1 to HSK5 or A1 to B2, according to the European CEFR guidelines.