The other day, I watched a video about learning Chinese. It was posted by a girl who speaks 13 languages, I think it is definitely very useful for the beginner.

So, I will share these scripts to you on how to start learning Chinese? where do you begin, if you have no idea where to begin? We've all been there, trust me. So I hope this could give you some good tips on where to start.

The first place to start is to learn some basic Hanzi, those are Chinese characters.

I suggest you look at websites that list the first 100 or the first most, you know, the hundred most used characters. These are really good to know because I'm basically, they're the most used. You're going to see them lost.

Try to learn the stroke order. So start right from the beginning on a good foot to learn how they are it. There are some rules, like you start top to bottom, left to right, stuff like that. It's a good idea to know exactly how to write the characters. That being said, I'm not saying necessarily start learning a whole bunch of complicated characters that you don't know about.

At the same time, please do learn basic greetings and grammar. Even if you only know a few basic sentences like the 你好，我叫, whatever your name is, those are still good to know because you can start making conversation.

Tip number two learned basic grammar structures.

You can learn this online on Youtube, through textbooks. Now, at the same time, try and learn some basic vocabulary. Once you've got a grammar structure, you can add in the vocabulary words that she learned. So write the one driver structure over and over. And fill in some new words to learn that way.

Point number 3, invest in a good textbook and a dictionary.

You don't have to pay a lot, in fact, you can just download a free dictionary. My favorite dictionary app is called Pleco, it is fantastic if you don't know what a word is, you can type it in. I have a Chinese keyboard with writing input, so I'll write the character with my finger. And if my keyboard picks it up, then it'll pop up on like.

Obviously, alternatively, you can type a word in English and don't give you the Chinese translation, so you can learn words like that. But it's always a good idea to invest in a character dictionary. Well, it'll help you find characters a lot more easily paper dictionaries are still nice to have.

In terms of textbooks, I can recommend New practical Chinese Reader, a lot of people in the study blur and language polyglot community use this textbook, and its great for beginners.

When I first started learning mandarin, I used Berlitz Basic Mandarin Chinese. It is indeed very basic. If you want to get fluent very fast, don't use it, but if you just want a base like if you're just going on 1 week's holiday to China, it's a really good idea to use it.

What I liked about it is its audio. So I used to just play the series of my car and it was really great to just constantly be hearing the language. Another really popular textbook is called Integrated Chinese, any textbook is good at anything you can use as a good starting.

Tip number 4, if you don't have the textbook, don't feel like using a textbook. You can start translating songs.

When I first started learning mandarin few years ago, I did not have a textbook for ages, and all I would do is look up songs that I like, and I would find the Chinese lyrics and thePinyinthat is like the English conversion of how you pronounce things like romanization and a look of that. And then I would write down every single character and what it means. This way you can up your vocab and what's good about translating songs, says, if you know the song well enough.

You'll be hearing the words and you'll know the words and the pronunciation really well. If I don't know how to pronounce a word, but I have the Chinese character, I mean, if I want to find thePinyin, there's a fantastic website called Purple Culture. What I do is I take a body of text and I copy, paste it into Purple Culture and get somePinyinfor me.

It's really good if I know that the character for big is 大, but I don't necessarily know it's the falling tone. I just know how to write, it is dā, it is dá, it is dǎ, it is dà, then I'll take the character in, and it will show me it is indeed dà.

Number 5, watch movies and TV shows in Chinese, with subtitles.

The reason I say you should watch TV shows and movies is that you'll constantly be exposed to a native pronunciation by hearing how people really talk, you can learn to copy them, and your accent will improve very rapidly.

Number 6, get a language partner

I'll be making another post on how to have a successful language exchange?

But for now, you can find a language partner pretty much anywhere, while you can use mylanguageexchange.com, immersionprograms.com, or Hello Talk.

Hello Talk is probably the best and most popular way to finding Language learning partners, so a tip for finding really good language partners to make a commitment to each other, that you will help each other and fix all the mistakes.

You can set up a time each day, each week to Skype with them, and if there are serious about learning your language as you are about learning, the language exchange should be successful. If you both commit. You can also come up with topics beforehand to talk to them about.

Number 7, a great tip for beginners is to download all the apps.

Here are some great apps to download,

Number 1, Hi Native, this is a fabulous app where you can ask native speakers questions about their language. The responses are pretty fast and accurate. And it also has a cool function where you could record yourself saying something, then people can say, oh, this is accurate, or I have no idea what you're saying practice more.

The next one, I think they have an app that I use the mobile, I mean the website, it's italki. You can write a journal entry or a little paragraph about something, and you'll receive corrections from native speakers who will fix your mistakes.

The next app, which I have reviewed before, so be sure to check it out, is called LingoDeer.

It's for learning Korean, Japanese, and Chinese. You can just select the Chinese if you want. And it's absolutely excellent. It has audio for everything, teaches you how to write the characters, and it's very grammar intensive. And as mentioned before, Hello Talk is a great app.

It has a timeline feature, which kind of also works like Facebook, so you can add photos and comments and ask people stuff. And you can also search for people to practice Chinese with.

And then a simple search, the app store will you the wonderful results. There are apps like Chineseskill, which is pretty good, but just for what you like. And what you want to use and practices using those apps.

And lastly, something I always say is keeping track of your progress. This is really motivational because you'll see how far you've come. So write a diary, make a blog, start a study ground. You guys have heard me say this a thousand times, so I'm not even going to talk about it further, but I guess I hope this was helpful for you.

If you are learning Chinese, please let me know. And we can be friends.