I’ve gathered here what I consider the best free resources for learning Mandarin and ranked them in order of usefulness. I reckon you could learn Mandarin very effectively, for free, using only these resources.
Tag: mandarin
Five free Chinese podcasts you should be listening to
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I really like Chinese podcasts as a source of listening material.
5 Lies Teachers Tell You About Mandarin Tones
Mandarin tones are one of the classic “difficult parts” of the language. Despite that, textbooks and teachers often do a bad job of teaching them. A big part of this is that the focus is too often on teaching tones, rather than teaching how to learn tones.
Improve Your Chinese With: Subtitles
There are quite a few language learning services that help you learn Chinese by giving you audio with matching text. It’s a great approach, because you can reinforce your listening and reading at the same time.
Improve Your Chinese By: Speaking Slowly
Time for some unusual advice: try to speak Chinese slower, rather than faster. Most advice you see about learning languages encourages you to go for “fluency” and speaking as much as possible. There is some merit to this – it is of course good to get in a lot of speaking practice.
Asking Yes / No Questions in Mandarin Chinese
There are two ways to ask yes / no questions in Mandarin: with the “ma” particle, or by using a positive / negative sentence structure.
Chinese Grammar -Coordinative Phrases 并列短语
A coordinative phrase is a single formed by two or much more phrases on the exact same portion of speech in coordinative relation. The terms in a coordinative phrase may possibly be separated by conjunction. The serial comma “、” can also be utilized to separate words in a coordinative phrase. When much more than two words are joined, a conjunction is positioned just before the last one. For instance:
Chinese Grammar learning: Subject + 简直 + Verb
简直(jiǎn zhí) is similar to "simply" or "completely" in English, and can be used to modify adjectives or verbs, adding a tone of amazement on the part of the speaker.
Grammar — Subject-Predicate Phrases 主谓短语
The subject may be the object of the statement and it is often a noun or pronoun. The predicate tends to make a statement in regards to the subject and is generally a verb or adjective. No function words are utilized between the subject and predicate. The majority of the words you mentioned contain it. For instance:
Chinese Grammar-Pronouns 汉语语法-代词
For example, there is no differentiation in the spoken language amongst "he", "she" and "it" (even though a written difference was launched following speak to with the West), and pronouns remain the same whether they are the matter or object of the sentence. Mandarin Chinese more lacks a distinction in between the possessive adjective ("my") and possessive pronoun ("mine"); both are formed by appending the particle “的” (de).
Vietnamese 
English 
French 
German 
Malay 
Thai 
Myanmar