So, I’ve started my journey to Chinese fluency. I’m know that I will not be fluent in 6 months or even a year but I am dedicating 2-3 hours per day on LingQ.
What would you guys recommend in terms of choosing courses? I’ve now worked my way through the beginner Stephen Krashen course (Harry & Min-Jee) but I do find the beginners courses rather monotonous at times.
Any tips would be appreciated! I’m tracking my progress on my YouTube channel also
Have a great day 
Welcome and wish you the best of luck on your chinese journey! I recommend in the beginning to go straight to the characters and try to learn how to read asap since you have a deadline I assume. After words, try to find content that has a monologue between two people. There are a lot of content on youtube with subtitles that has these kind of content. I would delay speaking temporarily to get the language in you through reading and listening. 加油！
Day 39 here, also starting from scratch! 
I found “Who Is She?” to be absolutely perfect for gaining a toehold in Chinese. The reason is that the story and vocabulary build on each other, which is built-in repetition. The story is also complex enough and has enough surprises to be interesting. I focused on one lesson per day and really spent a lot of time with it.
For the first 15-20 lessons, I kept up with the review every day. After that, I started doing some review at the end of each lesson but shifted time away from reviewing cards and towards just reading new material. So far, this seems to be working well.
When I feel like it and have extra energy, I also mix in ministories here and there. They’re bite-sized and useful.
For the last couple weeks, I’ve been importing graded readers from Mandarin Companion. I’ve finished three Breakthrough Level (150 characters) books and just completed The Monkey’s Paw (Beginner 1, 300 chars) last night. They go slowly at first, but it really speeds up once you get over the initial hump and by the end of the book lookups are rare.
I’m focused mostly on reading for now and getting used to the characters. I listen in the car and when I’m doing other things. I can hear most of the words, but can’t convert the words to meaning fast enough yet. Plan is to work on speaking and writing later.
That said, I do spent a good bit of time and energy on learning tones and tone pairs, as well as distinct pronunciation of similar initials (e.g. z, zh, ch, q, c, ch). Goal is for my internal “reading voice” to have at least decent pronunciation.
Don’t take this as any kind of expert advice. I’m really just making it up as I go. That said, I’m quite surprised and pleased with progress so far. Best of luck, and most of all have fun!
Oh, and real quick… Remove the spaces between words as soon as possible.
LingQ parses words somewhat randomly and the line between words usually doesn’t matter anyway.
You’ll also find that LingQ wants to count words very, very aggressively. It will take a proper noun and combine it with the next word and call that a new word, for example. It will also take every combination of characters in a word as its own word. Not X, very X, and extremely X are parsed as separate words from X. This X, that X, an X, another X, etc are also treated as separate words from X.
I try to only create LingQs for root words and ignore redundant combinations, but it’s not easy. It’s especially difficult in Chinese where multi-character words are often just multiple characters that are by themselves similar words.
It’s confusing at first, but once you dive in you’ll see that it doesn’t really matter and that’s why you’re better off without the spaces.
The result is that word based metrics are kind of meaningless and I’ve resorted to focusing on words read and hours listened rather than known words.
Hope that helps!
As beginner I found the dialogues from a site called Chinesepod to be very helpful, their older podcasts were released under a Creative Commons license, thus I was allowed to share them on LingQ. They are about 2008 vintage but can be quite helpful to internalize basic structures and patterns. Works best if listened to many times. I split them into 5 courses: Newcomer’s Mandarin (a bit primitive), Elementary Mandarin, Intermediate Mandarin, Upper Intermediate, Advanced Mandarin. Here is a list of some courses I shared: Login - LingQ
But if you want to dive into “real” content more quickly, that’s fine as well of course.
As to the stats on LingQ, similarly to BassmasterJJ, I would recommend ignoring the number of LingQs and known words and instead focus on words read and hours listened. I’ve found those to be more reliable metrics of progress. The word segmentation on LingQ might not be ideal but works just fine for beginner content. Still, occasional segmentation errors will accumulate over time, i.e. over millions of words read. While that’s not a huge problem, it’ll bloat the number of known words.
Thank you very much for your answers!
My other question was how do you think about sentence structure? I follow Steve Kaufmann’s advice to essentially ignore the grammar and to focus on patterns (which I successfully did with German and Spanish), does this work well with Chinese?
Yes, since the grammar structure is very identical to English, it won’t be difficult. Only the very complex grammar points is what’s gonna be a challenge but won’t appear often
I found this extremely helpful:
"One way to remember the word order in Chinese is the order in which things have to happen. For example, time has to pass before you can be at a place, so that goes first. You have to be at a place before you can do anything there, so the location comes before the verb. You need the instrument before you can use it, so that comes before the verb as well. Adverbs and complements are a little more difficult, but since they have to do with the verb itself, they go around the verb, either before or after it, depending on their role. "
Thank you for the advice & table!
I will be making a video on Saturday about my progress in my 1st week. It would be cool to talk about the advice you gave this week & see if it helps over time
When I started Chinese, I found two good courses on the internet. Both of them show an instructor talking to you (like a school class), but often use computer graphics to show things. Both courses show the written text along with the spoken, so you learn both of them (and grammar) at the same time. I recommend either course, for people that learn well in a structured course. They take the student from A0 to B1.
Hahaha would be cool if we had a talk about how you can approach chinese for the long term. Looking forward to your future videos
