Best ways to Learn Mandarin Online – 10 Ways to Win
Tip #1 How to Learn Chinese Online – Time Management
The first one is obvious, but many people tend to forget about it.
When you think about how long it will take you to learn Mandarin, do not think about it in the months or years that you are pursuing the task, but in hours that you are actually studying or practicing your Mandarin.
To learn Mandarin online means that you will not have to travel to a school or China to study. It does not mean you will not have to put in the hours.
This includes everything, from taking online lessons, to reviewing vocabulary and practicing to chat. However, you will need to get those hours in to learn Mandarin, whichever way you study.
Tip #2 How to Learn Chinese Online – Intensity
It does not matter if you study online or offline, to progress in Mandarin you will need to spend time studying it.
However, it is not only about how many hours you spend studying, but also how far they are spread apart.
Spending an hour every week studying Mandarin will just not get you ahead, whichever way you study and for however long you will do it.

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To learn Mandarin is very different for an English speaker than studying for example Spanish, German or French. It is a lot tougher.
Chinese words sound nothing like English ones and they are very easy to forget even after you learned and remembered them. If you do not regularly hear a word again and again after you learned it, you will simply forget it and all your previous learning effort was wasted.
Tones and characters work in a similar manner.
With many other subjects you can simply study a little bit every week and as long as you keep doing it for long enough you will still get there.
That is not how it works with Chinese for English speakers. For the best result you will need to repeat vocabulary very regularly for quite a while until a word moves from short term to long term memory.
So if you want to learn Mandarin, make sure you have sufficient time available to do so.
This varies for each student but from our experience six hours a week is an absolute minimum, but for real progress you need at least 10.
Note: If you know a language similar to Mandarin, like Cantonese, Japanese, Korean or Vietnamese, this can be different.