Recently I got a chance to visit China for the first time in my life. I got very much impressed by the country and decided to explore many more times. One biggest problem I found was the language. They no not a single word of English. It became worst because google services were not allowed there.

At the same time, I was bored due to working from home for a long time and was looking for something interesting to do. Hence I decided to learn Chinese. As part of this journey, I’ll try to write down my experiences here in my blog.

How I started?

Like everyone else, I started with Duolingo app. Today is my 66th day at Duolingo. It helped me to breakthrough the initial phase and get some confidence.

After a few weeks I realized two things –

• I need to learn how to memorize the hanzi characters. As they’re pictograph, so most of the characters has a historical context. Duolingo does not help here.
• I’m using free plan of Duolingo because the premium was expensive. So I was looking for other sources to practice.

So far, with the help of ChatGpt, I found two other useful apps – Hello Chinese and Hanly. Hello Chinese is very similar to Duolingo, but I can practice unlimited times with the free plan. Also their pronunciations are done by real people and seems more useful.

I’m using Hanly as a flash card app to memorize words. The best thing about Hanly is – it also tells the story behind the characters. It’s exposing the characters from easy to hard. It also explains the combination of characters gradually so that we can remember them easily.

It’s two months now since I started. At this stage, I feel I need to practice reading, writing and speaking. So I came back to my blog after more than one year and decided to write something everyday in Chinese. My plan is to write something in English about different topics like my family, foods, animals, work etc and then translate that to Chinese. Let’s see how far I can go!