An interesting picture that’s cleverly done. If you can get this, you are either a native or a rather high level learner

I don't know anyone who knows what HSK6 is so I want to talk a bit about it here.

For the listening part, I don't think I've ever done that badly on any practice set. I find listening is the most dependent on my mental state - sometimes I can understand most HSK6 content and other times it's near gibberish for me. I tried to lock in before the test by doing a bunch of mock listening questions, which felt like it had worked. During the test I immediately got more nervous than I have during any test in my life, I could feel my heart beating and not far into the listening section a mental battle started where I was thinking I had already failed and just wanted to check out. Fortunately I pulled it together for the reading and 82 is pretty good for the level I'm at.

My Chinese learning has been 100% self study and I literally passed HSK6 without ever having used 普通话 to communicate with another person (I am autistic). Because of this, my ability to write HSK is much higher than actual communication ability, and I definitely failed the HSKK高级（that was expected）。

Thanks for letting me get that off my chest.

I recently went to my family's ancestral hall in China and saw the tablet of the ancestor we're descended from. This ancestor and his brother founded the village in the early Yuan Dynasty, after their father died in the area. The tablet has the words "宋二世" followed by his name. I tried asking my relative but he wasn't sure what those three words referred to exactly but said it probably meant he was the second generation born in the Song Dynasty? Would anyone be able to confirm that is correct? Thank you.

I'm currently trying to get by with Duolingo and free textbooks from online, but it isn't working well for me -- I find Duolingo difficult to get into the swing of things and the lessons feel clunky, being difficult to absorb the information and learn

I specifically am looking for a decent free option as unfortunately I am currently a student and not in the finacial place to be able to get a paid app (but would still appreciate recommendations of them for in the future!).

Any other advice would be much appreciated also!

Thank you! :)

For context I am N2 level in Japanese. I have a passion for language learning to communicate with different people, and so I am keen on focusing on the listening/speaking aspect of the language.

Due to my background in Japanese, I thought it might help me with the Chinese script in terms of making an inference on what a word means due to me having learned radicals before. I can read most Japanese kanji needed for N2-N1 but don’t really know how to write them by memory (to which I don’t focus on anyways). Although I can still write kanji up to ~N3 by memory.

Now, my main goal for learning Chinese is to have conversations, make friends, listen to music, watch shows.

Is it possible to have a good grasp on the language just by focusing on reading/listening/speaking?

Any time i have to write something i have to use pleco (i hand write all the exercises from my textbook) so I don't think i remember many characters without pleco. Is it still possible for me to do HSK exams? Or do i have to remember every character without pleco? Cause if i read i can recognize a good 90% of all the characters I've studied but if you told me to write them down i could never.

https://i.imgur.com/DZUAkIL.jpeg

It's a task from the first chapter of the HSK2 workbook. I'm not sure how am I supposed to guess these words. I thought that maybe they use characters from other words I'd already learned in HSK1 or in this chapter, but apart from 杯子, they all use characters I've never seen before + 子. What am I missing?

I'm still a beginner and I've only been used to seeing 是 as the only verb in the sentence which means "to be"

But I've seen it in different contexts and would like to know what it means and what purpose it serves, ex:

你是第一次来我们这儿吗？

I currently use Memrise will that work?

hey I wanna start learning Chinese

how do I start?

what’s the best way to start?

best materials learn from?

fyi English isn’t my first language

The sentence I am looking at is 昨天下了一天的雪。 At first glance I thought it was a nominal sentance and that it ment, "the snow that fell for a whole day yesterday." This ment that it wasn’t a complete sentance and I asked chatgpt to explain it to me. It said that it ment, "It snowed for a whole day yesterday." And its reasoning was that since 了 was in the sentence that it could not be a nominal phrase. So is this true? Or is it gaslighting me again?

Edit: Thanks! I figured it out and talked with chatgpt and now I understand what it was trying and failing to tell me, and you gays did it within just a few seconds 😁

Hello, currently I am HSK 2 level and I want to watch some series, movies or adult animations to practice my listening. Thank you for your suggestions :)

Hi all!

I'm working on improving my Chinese accent and currently have:

• Some great resources that explain what my mouth should be doing—like Mandarin Blueprint, Outlier Linguistics, etc.

• Supportive native speakers who help by correcting my pronunciation (though they often can't explain how to fix it).

I'd love to book a few sessions now with a teacher who can do both: identify what I’m doing wrong and clearly explain how to adjust and improve.

Has anyone worked with a teacher like this? If so, I’d love to hear about your experience—and where you found them!

Need some help with understanding the difference between 外面 and 外边. Most of resources say that they basically mean the same, but is it really so? Can natives explain if there is even a slight difference between these two?

Hello! I've seen discussion while looking at this and had a question regarding pronunciation and the app HelloChinese.

First, as I'm sure is obvious, I'm essentially brand new to learning this language. I've seen a few positive comments for beginners about the aforementioned app and decided I'd give it a try (Not to rely on primarily, but before I look into hiring a tutor, I'd like to at least know tones and a few words of vocab.

I know pronunciation can vastly differ, but while going through the second lesson, 人 is pronounced with the "y" English sound, meaning it sounds like "yen". However, upon a small bit of research, people seem to say that's Cantonese pronunciation of the character? I'm also seeing (much more commonly) that it's much more common for it to be something between zh and j.

Sorry if this is a really basic question, I've learned Japanese prior, but felt I had a much more structured start, if yall have any textbooks you'd rec for beginners I'll happily accept tips as well!

Edit; in an absolutely embarrassing moment, I simply had far more trouble with hearing the distinction than I expected. Apologies!

I looked up several dictionaries, but found nothing that would make sense, usually

一派 either refers to "a school of thought" or "a crop of", both don't make much sense paired with

輕鬆

How do I address: - my mother’s father’s sister? - my mother’s cousin (mother’s father’s brother’s son)?

Hi fellow language learners, I am trying to take the HSK3 exam here in the United States, but I can barely find any test centers outside of New York and Virginia (I am on the West Coast). Having done some research, it seems like lots of test centers (often at Confucius Institutes) have shut down.

Emailing some test centers for advice has not yielded any clues on where to take the test. So in short, do you know where I can take the test this year? Ideally on the West Coast.

Good morning everybody, or good day

I hope to just ask this for understanding is okay.

I just like chinese Characters/signs and the Meaning behind them.

I want to learn every part of the language - but now i noticed i just want to play a little with hello chinese and the writing course + ytb content on signs and so on

But in the same time i fear that i should start with a comprehensive course with a teacher to not get Spellings wrong.

I heard that help a lot to get the pronounciation correct to start at least the first months with a Teacher (+ of course Keep practice with natives which i plan to)

Is there anything wrong with this way : 1. Learning just out of curiousity signs 2. Later on months later even start with a teacher / course ?

Because right now i dont plan to really go full into chinese and rather would go a bit with lighter online Material

How did you started chinese ? And what was your Initial motivation?

Have good day you all

I Have been using it, but i always press again if i wasn't able to remember the three things (Pinyin/Hanzi/Meaning) since i want to link the three of them

But i started worrying if i'm doing wrong because i don't want to mess the anki algorithm by press "okay" when it should be "hard", because of the whole FRSR thing, but i know on the original pages it says the intention is just to remember the meaning

Any thoughts on this?

Foreigners in China who like to think their Chinese is good tell me it directly translates to 'stupid c***' but I think this is way too strong. We know what the characters mean, but what would be the equivalent severity of swear word in English? Wanker? Dickhead? Stupid face?

EDIT: Thank you all for some very helpful responses!

I notice no one is talking about this fantastic animation one of the best with fast paced fight scenes

I've been learning Chinese on and off for quite a long time now, but I haven't made much real progress. I think it's mostly due to inconsistent study habits, but there's another issue I've noticed. I had over a 300-day streak on Duolingo and got pretty close to finishing the Chinese course. I learned a lot of characters, but as soon as I stepped outside the app and tried to use Chinese practically, I couldn’t. I couldn’t pronounce words correctly, and I barely recognized the characters I thought I had mastered.

Later on, I found out that Duolingo isn’t really an effective way to learn a language, especially Chinese. So I started looking into other methods. I’ve heard of the HSK and Anki decks, but I’m not sure which ones are actually good. From my research, a few things seem to come up often: focus on mastering pronunciation first, then learn the most common 150 characters to begin immersion, and from there keep building vocabulary and practice speaking. Also, it's suggested to minimize the use of Pinyin over time.

The problem is that most of these methods don’t come with consistent, structured resources—especially free ones. So I’m wondering: are there any solid free resources out there that follow this kind of approach?

Damn, i have been looking for so long for some good chinese content, and they release this masterpiece