Mandarin 101 for Complete Beginners

Learn how pinyin, the standard romanization for Mandarin, guides pronunciation and character input, compare it with Wade Giles and Giles, and preview the six simple finals.

Mandarin 101 for complete beginners lesson 6 introduces the six simple finals and guides students in pronunciation through lip shapes and practice, linking each final to familiar English vowel sounds.

Learn the four Mandarin tones—high level, rising, falling-rising, and falling—and the neutral tone, and see how tone changes meaning with examples like ma.

this lesson covers five pinyin spelling rules. it highlights no initial consonant before e, adding an initial e with two dots, apostrophes, and tone marks on the main vowel.

Review Mandarin pinyin by recapping initials and finals, including six simple and compound finals, and master the four tones plus a neutral tone through daily practice with examples and names.

Explore the five basic strokes and six stroke-order rules for Chinese characters, including dot, horizontal and vertical strokes, and writing from left to right, top to bottom.

Explore 13 basic Chinese character radicals and how they hint meaning, with examples including person, mouth, grass, fire, emotion, hand, water, language, metal, food, and motion.

Learn ten basic independent Chinese characters, understand stroke order and how similar two-stroke forms yield different characters, and explore radicals as the foundation of Chinese literacy with practice worksheets.

Practice ten more basic Chinese characters, including bull, white, long, fly, cloud, car, again, and heart, with guided stroke order and reinforced writing worksheets for beginners.

Finish the basic Chinese lessons by studying characters for wind, knife, net, work, body parts, and symbols like dragon, horse, and door, with stroke order notes.

Learn Chinese greetings like ni hao and practice writing key characters with top-bottom and left-right structures, covering morning, afternoon, and evening vocab.

Learn survival expressions in Chinese, including greetings like ni hao and good morning, and farewells such as zai jian and good night, with polite responses and see you again phrases.

Learn six singular pronouns, including I, you, the respectful you, he, she, and it, and see how non-human pronouns share pronunciation with different writing, influenced by gender radicals.

Learn to form plural and possessive pronouns in mandarin by adding the 'men' character to singular pronouns and the possessive 'de'; distinguish masculine and feminine 'they' forms.

This lesson teaches how to introduce your family name and given name in Mandarin, using ni hao and wo jiao, and how to introduce others by changing one pronoun.

Learn numbers zero to ten in Chinese, count 1 to 10 and backwards, practice stroke order, write the basic characters, and reinforce with a town twister exercise.

Learn to read and say multi-digit numbers in Chinese with place-value rules for tens, hundreds, and thousands, including two ways to say two and practical number exercises.

Focuses on writing Chinese family member characters, explains have or there is with yo, and shows left-right structure, female radical, and repetition patterns for ba, ma, didi, and mama.

Mandarin 101 for complete beginners lesson 35 teaches classroom people through a dialogue, introducing teacher, students, classmates, and friends, and explains Chinese sentence order with the person first.

Explore Chinese terms for elementary, middle, and high schools, and practice sentences about students and going to school, including elementary and college student phrases.

Learn to tell nationalities in Chinese using question words and the measure word, master writing stroke orders, and practice with country examples such as China, Macau, Japan, and Russia.

Learn how to say languages in Chinese, using the language character and language related terms, with examples for Chinese, English, French, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish.

Learn Chinese job vocabulary, from teacher and doctor to nurse, driver, lawyer, accountant, chef, waiter, engineer, artist, designer, and more, with family member profession examples.

Practice introducing yourself and your family in Mandarin by using greetings, name, age, family members, schools, nationalities, and jobs to form a clear, one-paragraph self-introduction.

Learn to say this and that here and there in Mandarin, form plurals with the appropriate character, and turn statements into questions using the question particle at the end.

Explore daily activity vocabulary and practice writing characters correctly, covering wake up, go to work, school dismissal, go home, shower, and sleep, with notes on water radical usage.

Learn to talk about three meals a day in Mandarin, including breakfast and dinner, with example questions like what time do you eat your breakfast and phrases about eating together.

Learn essential Mandarin food vocabulary—from cooked rice me fan to dumplings jiao za and vegetables hi—and practice asking what foods you like to eat using a complete sentence structure.

Learn Mandarin measure words for foods, including when to use whole items versus portions. Explore the weight unit jin (about 500 grams) and words for bottles and bowls with examples.

Learn to ask how much and how many, tell prices in dollars and cents, discuss per unit and per pound, and compute the total in Chinese currency.

Learn to order food in a Chinese restaurant using would like and one order of, practice a dialogue, and understand paying the bill with uncommon tipping.