Practise Mandarin Chinese with a native speaker, and give them English conversation practice in return. Roughly 940 million people speak Mandarin Chinese natively, so partners are easy to find; the useful discipline is showing up on time.
Endonym
普通话
Script
Hanzi - thousands of characters, plus Hanyu Pinyin for romanisation
Spoken in
China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia
First thing to learn
你好 — "Hello"
US Foreign Service Institute estimate for an English speaker starting from zero
~88 weeks
Furthest from English
Tones are not decoration. "Ma" at four different pitches means mother, hemp, horse or to scold - so a word is not learned until you can say its pitch, and English has no equivalent habit to reuse. There are also no shared roots with English, so nothing is guessable.
Knowing this in advance changes what you do with a partner. Grammar drills on Mandarin Chinesewill not fix a habit your first language gave you — only producing the sentence out loud and being corrected will. That is the specific thing an exchange gives you and an app does not.
A language exchange dies when nobody has anything to talk about. Take these into the call and you will fill the first half without silences.
Say 你好 (nee HOW) as your first line, then ask your partner when they would use it and when they would choose something more formal.
Ask your partner to write your own name in 普通话, then explain which sounds in your name do not exist in Mandarin Chinese.
Talk for two minutes about what you imagine daily life is like in China. Have your partner correct the parts you got wrong - in Mandarin Chinese first, then again in English.
Talk for two minutes about what you imagine daily life is like in Taiwan. Have your partner correct the parts you got wrong - in Mandarin Chinese first, then again in English.
Ask your partner for one sentence that exposes the hard part: Tones are not decoration.
Switch to English and ask your partner to explain their own language's hardest feature to you. This is the half where you pay for the practice, so take it as seriously as your own turn.
You are not here to improve your English — you already have it. Practise Mandarin Chinese with someone who speaks it natively, and pay for it by answering their English questions properly. Fluent English speakers are the scarcest resource on an exchange, which is why you will match quickly.
Mandarin speakers learning English frequently want spoken practice with a native speaker for study and business, and they can offer one of the most in-demand languages in return.
88 weeks of full-time study to working proficiency, on the US Foreign Service Institute scale - furthest from english. Tones are not decoration. "Ma" at four different pitches means mother, hemp, horse or to scold - so a word is not learned until you can say its pitch, and English has no equivalent habit to reuse. There are also no shared roots with English, so nothing is guessable.
Around 940 million native speakers, concentrated in China, Taiwan, Singapore. English has already borrowed tofu, kung fu, feng shui from it, so you are not starting from nothing.
Hanzi - thousands of characters, plus Hanyu Pinyin for romanisation. Because the script is not the one you read in now, reading and speaking improve at different rates and are worth practising separately rather than hoping conversation covers both.
你好 (nee HOW) - "Hello". 你好 is neutral. Swap 你 for 您 (nín) with someone older or more senior - it is the same word at a different level of respect, and it is expected rather than optional.
tofu, kung fu, feng shui and ketchup all reached English from Mandarin Chinese - 4 words you can use on day one.
Free matching, free voice calls, free video calls. One twenty-minute call is enough to know whether it works for you.
Start your exchange