Free Chinese online resources

If you don’t want to read all the below, here are the important links:
Learning Mandarin in one Thousand Words
Growing up with Chinese
Lang-8
Taiwan Digital Publishing System

There are so many online language study resources that it requires quite some work to evaluate them and decide which to use or follow. Many of them are paid services, some are based on language exchange, and some are just free. I do think that many of the paid classes can be very useful, and I am ready to pay for good Chinese classes. However, the problem is that there are so many of them that it is very hard to decide which one to follow and I was too worried about regretting a costly decision (being a paid service doesn’t necessarily mean being a good service). I think I’d also rather pay for real-life Chinese classes.

It’s not much easier with the free resources though, and it took me quite a while to go through the abundance of language blogs, language classes that pretended to be free but then ask for credit card details, video based, text based, pinyin-only, or podcast classes. Many would cover only very basic Chinese. Some did not provide enough explanations on grammar. Some talk too fast. Some provide only simplified characters. Or no characters at all. Some have a horrible user interface, some cannot be used on Linux.

I am now sticking with two e-learning classes and one exchange platform. I learn new vocabulary and grammar in the classes and then compose texts (or rather, loose sentences), which are corrected on the exchange platform.

Online classes
In the jungle of online resources I found two classes that I am now following on a regular basis. One is a video-based programme from the mainland and uses only simplified characters. However, it is very good in many other aspects, so I do the extra work of looking up the traditional characters. It starts from zero but advances quite fast. Each class takes 15min, introduces some everyday vocabulary and explains some grammar. It features the family of the Chinese teenager 小明 and the American exchange student Mike. Their stories are fun to watch. The programme is provided by the Chinese Television and can be found here: Growing up with Chinese.

The other is provided by the Taiwanese government and has pretty much everything: Video lectures, grammar overviews, reading practice, traditional characters with the option to toggle the simplified version, and pronounciation in Zhuyin and Pinyin. There is a strong focus on listening, and each sentence is repeated many times on different occasions, in different speeds, and by different speakers. At the end of each lecture there are exercises based on listening comprehension, character recognicion, Zhuyin/Pinyin pronounciation, and grammar. The Programme can be found here: Speak Mandarin in one Thousand Words. The Taiwanese government provides many more useful resources in their Digital Publishing System.

Language exchange
On language exchange platforms, users support each other learning languages. This can include correction of exercises, correction of texts, explanations on grammar, semantics, or culture related issues. I had a quick look at three popular platforms and sticked with one of them.

There is Livemocha, which looks fancy, but doesn’t work on Linux. Yes, that’s pretty weird since it’s a web-based service. I did make it work by running Firefox in Wine, but then abandoned it because I was overwhelmed by its features. The same feeling I had with Busuu. For me, there are just too many features. Too many colorful, blinking things that conceal structure. Livemocha and Busuu not only offer correction by fellow language learners, but a whole learning programme, with lessons and quizzes. I found the lessons to be unstructured and the quizzes to be much too easy.

And then there is Lang-8, which I have really gotten to like. It’s very simple: Write anything you want in your target language and get it corrected by native speakers. In turn, correct stuff other people wrote in your native language. Very straightforward! There are some annoying advertisements in the free version, but I understand that income has to be generated somehow. There is a paid version which eliminates the ads and lets you add more than two target languages. Lang-8 is a lot of fun. I can choose what I want to correct, and I got to correct some really fun texts in German written by people around the world. My Chinese writings usually get corrected on the same day. Often one text is corrected by more than one person, and it’s interesting to see different opinions about some mistake I make.