Learn Mandarin to conversational in twelve months
A year of daily practice — 45 minutes a day on app, reading and tutor calls — gets a determined English speaker to halting but real conversations and HSK 3 reading. Roughly 270 hours total. The tones and characters are the work; the grammar is the easy part.
12 months · ~270 hours · hold a 10-minute conversation, read graded HSK 3 stories
1.HelloChinese
The single best beginner app for Mandarin. It teaches pinyin, tones, characters and HSK-aligned vocabulary in a sane order, with proper tone visualization, stroke-order practice and speech recognition that actually flags wrong tones. Reach the end of HSK 2 (around 300 characters, 600 words) in roughly four months at 20 minutes a day. This is the foundation; nothing else free or paid is as well structured for absolute beginners.
Free tier covers HSK 1; Premium $13/month or $60/year unlocks HSK 2–6
HelloChinese →2.Du Chinese — graded reading
Hundreds of short stories ranked Newbie through Master, with built-in audio, tap-to-translate, and pinyin you can toggle off as you improve. Reading is where vocabulary stops being flashcards and starts being a language. Read one Newbie story a day from month three; aim for one Intermediate story a day by month nine. Do not finish a story you don't enjoy — there are hundreds, swap.
Free tier rotates a few lessons; Premium $9/month for full library
Du Chinese →3.italki — community tutor
By month five you'll know enough to stumble through introductions. Book a community tutor for 30-minute conversation lessons twice a week. Mandarin community tutors run $8–15/hour and the supply is enormous. Tell yours you only want to talk, that you'll bring topics, and that they should ruthlessly correct your tones — wrong tones are the single biggest reason native speakers will not understand you. Same tutor every time.
~$8–15/hour, pay per lesson
italki Mandarin tutors →If this doesn't fit you
If you only need spoken Mandarin and refuse to learn characters, replace Du Chinese with the Pimsleur Mandarin Chinese audio course ($21/month) and stay in pinyin forever. You'll plateau fast — modern life in Mandarin requires reading — but you'll be able to hold a taxi-and-restaurant conversation in three months. Many travelers and short-term expats stop here on purpose, and it's a defensible choice.
Why this path
Mandarin grammar is famously simple — no conjugation, no plurals, no gender. The work is in tones and characters, and both demand sustained, daily contact rather than weekend cramming. HelloChinese builds the foundation faster than any textbook; Du Chinese turns reading from intimidating to addictive; italki makes you produce tones in real time before bad habits set in. The one universal mistake: studying characters in isolation through Anki for months without ever reading anything. Read early, read often.