Free Mandarin Chinese Lessons











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Are you just starting to learn Chinese and looking for a comprehensive Mandarin Chinese language course? If so, you’ll be pleased to know that the most comprehensive course ever produced is actually 100% free.

Developed in 1974 by the Foreign Service Institute of the US State Department, the FSI Standard Chinese Course was developed in order to train US and Canadian diplomats in modern Chinese as spoken in Beijing and Taipei at the time.

The core course consists of 55 lessons broken into 9 modules focused on various aspects of daily life. In addition to the lessons there are very comprehensive drills to help students master the constructs introduced in the lesson.

In the original printed version the course was over 1,200 pages with 90+ hours of audio. Comprehensive indeed!

In addition to the core modules there are also 5 additional resource modules plus a comprehensive introductory module covering Chinese pronunciation and tones.

Although dated in parts, the FSI Standard Chinese Course remains the best free Chinese course available.

We felt that this extraordinary resource was under-utilized by many students as today as the available scanned pdf documents and audio files can be hard to follow.

In order to make them more useful we have taken the original workbook and audio files and combined them into a more web-friendly and hopefully useable format.

To date, we have transcribed the first 4 modules along with the lesson drills and are in the process of transcribing the remain modules and additional material.

We hope you find them useful.