Welcome to Learn Chinese

All lessons posted on this site require users to be logged in to access course materials. Once logged in, the newest free materials and paid-for materials will appear on the homepage.

This site offers you several levels of learning convenience:

1. The experienced language learner

You can probably go through all our lessons posted for free on the site and will probably be able to learn on your own with little extra assistance. Why do we offer this for free? Because you have to do all the work!

Even if you’re an experienced language learner, like myself (Mike), you probably don’t want to have to deal with the hassle of doing homework and all that extra studying. I’ve been working on dozens of languages and still am, so if this system existed for all languages, this is the first system I’d choose to master a language. I cut wasted time out of your schedule and wasted expense on buying more courses by the hour or semester.

2. Just-trying-it-out language learner

Not sure yet whether Chinese is something you could ever learn or not? Once you get over some pronunciation differences that you’re used to in European languages, it’s not as hard as European languages to learn. Give it a try and you won’t be disappointed.

Again, I recommend the tried-and-true method built into this site. Our English training site already has hundreds of experienced believers in this system. Built by a language learner and linguist made for the average joe, you can’t go wrong.

3. The committed, serious language learner on a busy schedule and tight budget

This is the perfect system for you as we’ve cut out an incredible amount of time it takes to learn such a distant language. With very little chitchat we get right down to business in every video giving you a chance to repeat the sentences and conversations. You spend less than an hour a day (we try to get all training materials within a half hour but not always possible) and doing one video per day using this method is all you need to master the communicative abilities in this language.

By the time you’re through Module 1, you’ll be able to speak at a regular conversational level with anybody–whether you’re still translating internally or starting to grasp it naturally you’ll still be able to converse. You’ll be able to use all the verb tenses and aspects and comparisons and discuss deadlines, people, schedules etc, just as fluently as you do in English. We show you step-by-step how to build sentences up and help you drill and review them throughout the videos.

As a full-paying member, each video you get has five sections in the following order:
1. A review of 4 lessons back. We go through the conversations quickly and all in Chinese.
2. A review of 3 lessons back. We go through (sometimes sentence structures and) conversations and cue in English if necessary.
3. A review of 2 lessons back. We do a review of vocabulary cued in English (if necessary), a review of sentence structures and conversations.
4. A review of last lesson. We do a complete review of vocabulary and sentence structures with cues in English. We introduce the conversations for the first time and do extra explaining of anything we didn’t cover the first day.
5. The new lesson. We introduce new vocabulary and sentence structures and explain the differences between English and Chinese.

As you can see, the review of each lesson from video to video changes. The single video introducing new lessons just isn’t enough to learn the new material. With each review in each successive video, we continue to cue and pick up the pace putting these newly learned phrases into conversations.

Not many people understand linguistic terminology, but in the videos, Mike not only uses linguistic terminology in a professional manner to describe what’s happening in the sentences, he also waters it down so anybody can understand it. In this way, he addresses both the linguists and casual language learner. These videos are not prepared by some guy doing grammar guesswork or giving you a short list of words to cheat your way through a dinner or a meeting with foreign guests–it’s a full-immersion conversation training program based on new discoveries on how the brain learns new skills and builds memories. Mike has been through both DLI and FSI language training programs and a linguistics degree from Indiana University, one of the top linguistics and foreign language training universities not just in the United States, but in the world. A skilled polyglot and well-versed linguist, Mike has researched and worked with languages in every branch of Indo-European (except Celtic), and also languages of the Sino-Tibetan, Afroasiatic, Niger-Kordofanian, Khoisan, Caucasian, Altaic-Japanese-Korean, and Austronesian language families.