Summary

Everyday Chinese provides a free YouTube channel and purchasable courses. The teachers ensure that you learn how real-life mandarin is spoken, even in the most basic lessons — you will hear the voices of Chinese speakers ranging from 7 to 60 years old so you can train your ear to different vocal ranges and accents. On the YouTube channel, you can explore idioms, cultural nuances, HSK content, and more. Some of the videos seem like a list of words or phrases, but most contain valuable tidbits or grammar points. For beginners, they have 39 free intro lessons that seem to lead up to the Everyday Chinese 101 course that you can buy on their site. The videos may not always be as engaging as those in YoYo Chinese or Mandarin Corner, but they cover a lot of grammar and vocabulary words. They also mainly use Chinese in the upper-level videos to help with your listening comprehension, which is not always the case in other videos.  On the website, there are free MP3s, quizzes, and PDFs that accompany the YouTube videos. There, you can also purchase the courses, which contain videos, quizzes, word reviews, dialogues, grammar points, language tips, and cultural notes. The HSK courses, in particular, seem to be well done, although you do end up paying about $60 for only 20 days of content.

Summary

Chinese Boost provides grammar articles and Chinese learning blog posts. You can search the Chinese grammar articles by HSK or CEFR level, keywords, characters, parts of speech, functions, and several other tags. They also have over 40 blog posts that focus on improving the effectiveness of your Chinese study techniques. The site only has about 50 grammar articles. The articles themselves have lots of examples, but they seem more lengthy than they need to be. In contrast, the website Chinese Grammar Wiki appears to say more with fewer explanations, relying on examples and context to clarify different grammar points. Chinese Boost could be used as a supplemental resource to Chinese Grammar Wiki if some concepts require more explanation.  Other than the grammar explanations, Chinese Boost’s Chinese learning blog has some useful tips to add to your language-learning toolbox. They also have a Hanzi Chinese Characters to Pinyin Conversion tool, which can be very helpful when making Anki flashcards or other self-study resources.

Summary

Shuo is a native Chinese speaker and teacher who lives in Thailand. Every week she uploads YouTube videos exploring Chinese vocabulary, grammar, and culture, showing you how to use simple concepts to make your Chinese sound more advanced (like in this video). She diversifies her videos by adding video clips and images, dressing up as different characters, and reenacting scenes from her life. She makes the lessons fun, and if you pay close attention you’ll notice that she also has an excellent sense of humour.  Shuo mostly uses English to explain different concepts, but she has videos dedicated to listening practice with subtitles and translations. She also identifies the level of HSK vocabulary words she uses. Although Shuo does not have the hundreds of videos that other channels may have accumulated, the quality of her videos is reflected in the over 66k subscribers she seems to have accumulated in less than a year. Her channel has material from HSK 1-6, so learners of all levels can find some gems of knowledge. She understands Chinese learners’ potential missteps and clearly explains how to avoid them — even the beginner videos contain concepts that an upper-intermediate learner may not have considered, so check them out!

Summary

Dig Mandarin has about eight different types of courses, many of which focus on the HSK exams. You can specify which aspect of the HSK you want to work on, or you can take a full HSK course for each level that focuses on character writing, vocabulary, grammar, and HSK mock exams. One of the teachers on the site uses animations and colourful videos for her lessons, while the rest use simple PowerPoint presentations. Watching their videos feels similar to attending a university class, which may or may not be your style. They do seem to thoroughly cover the HSK curriculum if that is your only goal — if your goal is to become functional in Chinese, however, perhaps consider investing a little more into courses from YoYo Chinese or ChineseFor.Us, especially if you’re a beginner to intermediate learner. Besides the courses, Dig Chinese has some helpful articles, including some that differentiate between words with similar meanings (like 连忙, 急忙, and 匆忙). They also have sections on learning vocabulary, but these pages are simply lists of vocabulary words with an image and a recording — if you are determined to actually learn new words, use Pleco‘s Flashcards or Ninchanese instead.

Summary

Summary

Bai Xue started her Youtube channel seven years ago and still updates relatively regularly. She has over 200 videos, which are basically PowerPoint presentations with a voiceover description of each lesson. The videos could be helpful for intermediate and beginner learners, especially the ones that differentiate between words with similar sounds or meanings. Her other lessons focus on dialogues, word lists, and tongue twisters, and she often explains literal translations of sentences to help you understand how the language is structured. However, Xue Bai seems to teach like she is giving a lecture rather than a presentation, so the videos are not very dynamic. Whether or not you enjoy the videos is dependent on your learning style — the information is helpful as long as you can sit through them. If you prefer to read short and concise grammar explanations, Chinese Grammar Wiki may be a better option. Chinese Corner and YoYo Chinese also have some engaging videos about Chinese culture and language.

Summary

HanziCraft is a free dictionary that can help you understand simple decompositions of Chinese characters. The site will indicate the radicals that make up each character, pronunciation clues, and example words that contain the character. It’s probably a good idea to combine HanziCraft with the Zhongwen Chrome Extension because many of the word lists do not have pinyin or English translations.  Hanzicraft is a simple site, developed and maintained by one person (Niel de la Rouviere). Most of the information is compiled from other sites that have done extensive research. Its interface is more intuitive compared to MDBG and Zhongwen, but if you are looking to purchase the mobile app you may want to look into other options. You can try Outlier Linguistics, a Pleco add-on, or YellowBridge, a dictionary website that includes similar features and more.

Summary

The free Zhongwen Chrome extension is easy to use. Simply download the extension and activate it whenever you are on a site with Chinese characters — both traditional and simplified. When you hover over a character, you will see a pop up with several definitions. At first, it seems like this is all Zhongwen has to offer, but one quick glance at the keyboard shortcuts popup will tell you differently. You can add words to a wordlist (and export that list to Anki), directly add words to Skritter flashcards, or open a quick shortcut to dictionary sites like Forvo and Line. The shortcut list is a bit finicky, so you may have to click the Zhongwen extension icon and take a screenshot to remember what each key does. Unfortunately, the app can’t translate full sentences, and sometimes when characters are part of a hyperlink you can only receive the definition of the first word. Nevertheless, Zhongwen is a free app that can improve your Chinese reading experience. Readlang is a similar application that has less thorough definitions, but it allows you to translate full sentences (although this is a paid feature). With Readlang, the translations will remain on the screen until you intentionally remove them. Both of these apps can be used together depending on your needs.