Reviews

Hundreds of resources to help you teach yourself

Audio Lessons

For All Your Pinyin Needs

3-5 Mandarin, Audio Lessons, Websites

I read about this pronunciation table in Yong Ho’s book Beginner’s Chinese. Mandarin has amazingly few sound combinations—only around 400 different syllables, versus many multiples of that in English—so they can all be stuck in…

iTunes: for the Latest Hits, and Chinese Nouns, Too!

3 Mandarin, Audio Lessons, Vocabulary

VocabuLearn Mandarin Chinese comes in three different levels, for a total of nine hours of vocabulary instruction. I tried only the first level for Mandarin, but I have logged many VocabuLearn hours across a number of languages and would say…

Pimsleur Mandarin Chinese Develops Your Speaking Skills

5 Mandarin, Audio Lessons

Pimsleur is my favorite language-learning product to date across multiple languages. Over the past four years, if I count repeat lessons, I have done literally thousands of Pimsleur lessons.  A Pimsleur lesson is a highly interactive oral and auditory…

Live Lingua: Keeping the Free FSI Language Courses Alive

Arabic, Dutch, French, General, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Audio Lessons, Websites

These Foreign Service Institute language courses were recommended by a reader. I haven’t tried them, but the holdings are extensive and consist of older courses that are now in the public domain. They are also free, so the main…

DLIFLC: Language Resources for Free

Arabic, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Audio Lessons, Multimedia, Websites

A reader whose opinion I respect directed me to this website for the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLIFLC). Here you can find a lot of free multimedia language-learning material (audio, video, print) for numerous languages, including multiple Arabic…