this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2026
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Hi,

I've tried duolingo for about 2 months straight and all I know how to say is rice, american, italian, english, water and some other useless stuff, it doesn't even teach you to write or anything like that. It sucks.

I know the best way to learn a language is to go to a teacher or something, but I prefer not to do that and learn it online.

It will probably be harder for me since my native language is not english and I doubt there's lessons or something online for mandarin in my native language, but I'm willing to try, I know english pretty well.

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[–] bobs_guns@lemmygrad.ml 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

In conclusion the sites and apps I recommend are:

  • Pleco for graded reading, sentence harvesting, looking up and learning new words
  • Anki for reinforcing memory of phrases with repetition and pronunciation practice
  • Edge TTS or Kagi Translate to add audio to arbitrary phrases in Anki
  • Whisper to easily transcribe audio to text phrases for Anki
  • Shadow libraries for graded readers at your level
  • Or Du Chinese if you don't want to put in the work to find content on your level and have money
  • Youtube channels with slow Chinese, to use for shadowing and chorusing
  • Little Fox, to use for shadowing and chorusing, use repetition to compensate for poor grading
  • Dong Chinese to keep track of content at your level for shadowing and chorusing practice and to give you phrases appropriate for your level in Anki
  • Kagi Translate to help practice writing sentences while understanding nuances in the meaning more easily and correcting mistakes
  • Or another translation app if you don't want to pay for Kagi
  • Finally, italki to get tutoring in the language and bridge the gap to speaking if you have money
  • Or language learning discords if you don't
  • Finally use Heavenly Path to help find extensive reading materials at your level

After doing all this you should be able to make some good progress on your Mandarin pretty efficiently.

[–] bobs_guns@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I also recommend not trying to adopt this entire learning system all at once. You will definitely be overwhelmed. Just start with a couple things every like 4 days, you should be able to adopt the whole thing piecemeal.

[–] Munrock@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 2 months ago

Yeah start with pleco and the low-stroke count but frequently seen characters. 一二三四日月男女人左右 etc