14 Websites to Learn Mandarin Chinese Lessons Online (Free and Paid)

Udemy have a very wide variety of Chinese courses available for selection on their website. There are 854 lessons that can be chosen to learn Chinese from at any time. These lessons focus on a multitude of different things.

They have a wide enough variety of lessons to make you completely fluent in the language, as there are lessons for beginners, intermediates and advanced speakers of the tongue.

This means that you can take lessons meant for every skill level step by step and fulfil your goal of learning Chinese. A large amount of their courses will be focusing on teaching you about conversational Chinese.

These lessons can prepare you for conversations about any specific topic or for a conversation regarding nearly anything.

A variety of the courses available also offer workbooks and assignments that can help a lot as they are a way for you to work on what you’ve already learned.

This lets you advance your own knowledge by yourself and all the lesson will be doing is providing you with a foundation to start working with.

Coursera have a large enough quantity of lessons on their site to keep everyone satisfied, regardless of their skill levels or age.

They have 560 total lessons available to choose from and each of these lessons will be different from each other one way or another. First off are their beginner courses, these are the ones found most commonly on the site.

Most of their beginner courses will help you build a foundation. These ABC courses will help you learn simple phrases that are used in everyday situations so that you can comfortably initiate a conversation with any person in Chinese.

On top of this, some will help you learn a bit more and teach you how to ask for things like directions, food and everything of the sort which can be quite helpful if you’re a tourist in a Chinese speaking country.

These beginner lessons are mainly good for learning simple pronunciations and grammar. Other than these are the lessons that you can use in order to become more advanced and prepare for tests.

There are a few over 175 Chinese courses available to choose from on edX. These lessons, like the ones on other sites, will be covering different topics, while the ones that feature similar topics will have their own unique ways of teaching them.

They have lessons on Mandarin Chinese and the other different dialects commonly spoken in the country of China.

What you’ll notice about more than a few courses you’ll find on the site is that they are all related to each other in one way. A lot of them are a part of a series of lessons that teach you different things in each one.

These series courses are actually very helpful, as they help you grow step by step. Each of them will be teaching you something based on the last entry in the series.

Other than this there are simpler courses for those that wish to go to China on a tour and want to know enough so that they can guide themselves around places and hold a conversation with locals.

There isn’t exactly loads to choose from when it comes to the Chinese lessons on Future Learn. They have 14 lessons, which isn’t exactly a lot.

However that is nothing to worry about since the few courses that they do feature are more than enough to get you started with the language. A large majority of the few courses that they do feature are for complete beginners.

Each lesson focuses on something completely different. The ones based on pronunciation will obviously be teaching you about everything you need to say specific words in a certain way so that the people you are speaking to can understand you perfectly.

The course will be focusing on introducing you to the four different main tones of the Chinese language, along with the essential phonetics etc.

The other lessons will be talking about other important things, one key example of such being grammar.

The grammar courses will teach you all you need to know in order to form and understand proper sentences in order to hold casual conversations.

Preply is a platform where students and teachers from all over the world can come together in order to help each other out. Teachers that are experts on certain topics can help students that need help with said topics.

In the case of the Chinese language, there are more than enough different teachers available on the site who are more than qualified to tutor you.

There are tutors of every sort, whether straightforward and simple or energetic and fun, it is your choice what type of teacher you wish to study from.

Their site is very detailed and will tell you all you need to know about the tutor you are interested in, including how good they are at Chinese according to the CEFR scale and how long they’ve been teaching for etc.

They have Chinese tutors that are excellent in a variety of different languages, meaning that you can probably find a tutor that is fluent in your own language if you are not that great at understanding and speaking English yourself.

Skill Share feature only a couple short of 125 courses on their site that can help you learn Chinese. Although it may feel like this is a little less as compared to some of the other sites on the list, their courses have enough variety to teach you anything Chinese related.

There are specific lessons tailored to be perfectly suited for people of specific levels. There are lessons meant for people that have absolutely no prior language of the Chinese language, people that are proficient speakers, and everyone else in between.

Some of their courses will take on a straightforward approach while others will try to make your learning experience more fun rather than serious.

Depending on the type of tutoring you prefer you can choose either type of lesson. What’s good about the site is that it and all of the lessons it features are accessible at all times.

The beginner lessons will feature mainly conversational Chinese and the things that you would need to know in order to effectively communicate with someone.

Reed.co features over 130 different lessons available on their site that can teach you about Chinese and its different dialects. From beginners to advanced speakers, they have courses for pretty much everybody to take.

Their courses are supplied by the top educational institutes, mainly in the UK. This is because they are a site that originated from the United Kingdom and most of the institutes that supply them with top level courses are from the region.

Their courses provide you with lifetime access, at least most of them. This means that once you purchase a course which claims to supply life time support, you will be able to study from that course whenever and wherever you want. 

These courses are obviously also self-paced so you can study at your own rate whenever you wish to.

A lot of the courses on the internet, whatever they may be for, are meant for either advanced, beginners, or intermediate students. However that isn’t necessarily the case on Reed.co as they’ve some lessons that can be taken by anybody.

Learn Direct are another United Kingdom based website on this list. They focus on providing students such as yourself with everything that they would need in order to grow in their respective fields.

They have a variety of different courses available for every topic, including the Chinese language. From beginner to advanced they have lessons for everybody, and in this case, most of these lessons have been provided by the same source.

Their Chinese courses are usually taught by the same fun method which is both effective and doesn’t put a strain on students by making them study a bit too much.

This features phrases and words that you would need for the most common daily situations, along with everything else you would need in order to grow, such as proper guidance for starters.

Their courses also include fun and interactive games that start to get more and more difficult as you keep playing them, meaning that they have a fun way of letting you test yourself and see how much you’ve grown.

Free Chinese Lessons is an online platform solely devoted to helping you learn the language of the Red Dragon.

The site is ideal for anyone hoping to learn Chinese, especially children, as it can teach you how to understand, speak, read and write the language so that you can call yourself a proficient user. But that is not the only reason why it is a good platform.

As you can see in their name, the courses that they provide you will be completely free, meaning that not only can you use their site to learn Chinese from the comfort of your home, you can also do so completely free of cost.

This means that you can take their lessons without a worry in the world, as there is no risk. No sign-ups are required either.

Just open their site and choose one of the variety of lessons they have in store for you. They have different things for every topic, leaving you with an awfully wide variety at your disposal.

Mondly is another platform which allows people such as yourself from all over the world to learn any language they wish from the variety that Mondly feature.

As you can see from the title, their courses are completely free of cost, and another good thing about them is that they are quite effective and easy to work with.

They try to provide the people of the world with an easy alternative to taking classes with a tutor in person or going to an academy.

A lot of people don’t have such facilities near them, meaning that they can’t go to study, while a lot of people don’t wish to study offline in general. Instead, using their application, these people can learn all they wish to about the Chinese language.

Their lessons are designed by experts in specific languages, meaning that all their Chinese courses are designed by native speakers or people that have earned their master’s degrees in the language. This means their courses are fully able to make you fluent.

E-Chinese Learning is a platform made to provide students such as yourself with tutors that can teach them everything they wish to learn about Chinese.

The site is completely devoted to teaching Chinese to the people of the world and doesn’t focus on anything else. They provide you with a tutor that matches the criteria set by you.

It doesn’t matter if you are a beginner, an intermediate, or an advanced speaker of the Chinese language, if you wish to learn further the site will help find you a tutor that can help you with exactly that.

Not only do they have teachers qualified to teach people of every skill level, they also have some that are fitted to teaching specific age groups, meaning that there should be no problem for you to find a tutor for a young child on the site.

The classes that you take with the platforms tutors will all be through a video call which will be held between you and your tutor only.

Busuu are a platform that provide over a 1000 lessons that you can take in order to learn a specific language. They have 12 different languages available for selection and you can choose any of the ones that you wish to learn.

Their lessons are designed by language experts that have made them to be both effective and easy to work with, meaning that while you will be able to learn anything that you want to learn, you’ll also be able to do it with significant ease.

When it comes to their Chinese course, they have just over 60 different units, each unit obviously focusing on different things like introduction and grammar etc.

Their app provides access to a lot of things other than just these lessons, one of the main ones being the Busuu community which you can join in order to communicate with others taking the same courses as yourself.

Their vocabulary trainer lets you set targets for yourself and allows you to learn as much as you want under a week.

These free courses available on China Education Centre are somewhat ideal if you wish to get started with Mandarin Chinese.

These lessons are 32 when it comes to their total amounts and they’ll be able to help you with pretty much anything you need to get started. These 32 lessons focus on different things, some of the key ones being conversation basics, greetings, tones, accents etc.

The first lesson that you’ll be taking out of the 32, if you wish to go in the sites recommended order, will be pinyin pronunciation basics. Pinyin can be basically defined as the Romanization of the many Chinese characters in the dialect.

This first lesson will focus on telling you all about the similarities in tones and pronunciations of pinyin, along with why it is quite easy to learn for English speakers.

Similarly, the other courses will teach you simple, specific things such as grammar and accents. All these things are important as learning them is the only way to form a strong foundation.

Class Central aren’t really a site that has any lessons of their own. Instead they are a platform that have made things easier for students such as yourself by collecting lessons from other sites and providing you with the ones that best match your criteria.

You can search for any specific lesson and it along with every high rated course similar to it will appear on your screen, allowing you to choose from the one you think will work best for yourself.

This obviously means that you can find a Chinese course for a person of every level, even if they are completely proficient.

The lessons that they provide are from the top websites and institutes over the world so that you feel like the lesson you are taking can be trusted.

These classes will be covering a variety of different topics, such as helping you learn how to converse in Chinese while some will be focusing on teaching you how to properly listen to and understand the language when others are speaking.