Beginner goals

The hardest part of learning any language is the initial stage. We don’t know any words, we don’t know the writing system, and we can’t even hear all of the sounds in the language. Here, we present a quickstart method to get us out of this stage as quickly as we can. Follow this advice until you get to a point where you can begin to immerse in easy native Mandarin content.

As a beginner, your mission is simple:

Get to a point where you can begin reading in Mandarin.

To do this, you have the following goals:

• Listen to 100 hours of the spoken language.
• Learn the 2,000 most common words.
• Learn to read the 1,000 most common characters.

These goals are listed in order of priority. If you have the choice on any given day between listening to the spoken language and learning new words or learning new characters, immerse yourself in the spoken language. If you have to choose between studying words in pinyin and learning new characters, choose to learn new words.

These goals are reasonable to achieve in roughly 6 months, give or take.