After a month or so on Pimsleur Mandarin as a total beginner, I was feeling pretty good about myself so I posted some voice recordings to get feedback. The feedback I got was along the lines of “uhh yeah we can’t really understand you bud”.

That forced me to actually go learn Pinyin and learn about the j/q/x consonants. It took me about 2 months of obsessive practice to fix all the wrong pronunciations I taught myself from 1 month of Pimsleur.

I think for any non Western European language, it’s much better to learn the basics the old fashioned way, especially the writing system and all the phonetic aspects of the language that don’t exist in English.

The flip side is many people learn bad pronunciation habits because of reading. Things like Chinese tones for native English speakers or L/R for native Japanese speakers are always going to be hard and no single textbook, tape or app will fix that.

I should be clear that I was watching YouTube videos as much as reading over those two months. And I was aware from my experience taking Spanish classes that a letter in English probably sounds different from the same letter in $LANGUAGE2.

To be honest it’s hard for me to understand the “Pinyin teaches you wrong pronunciation” line of thinking. It so commonly repeated by so many people that there must be something to it, but not for me.

This is a good place for an early intervention. I had u and the consonants explained to me around lesson 2-3, and I did fine. I practiced them every time, comparing myself to the speaker.

I got railroaded on the difference between i and e. My chi and my che sound basically the same. This is little enough that people seem to understand well enough, but it's sometimes a bit awkward.

Yeah. I would’ve saved a lot of time if I got feedback after the very first lesson instead of waiting a month. I might have been productive continuing to use Pimsleur in that case.

Pimsleur Chinese is excellent, but it takes patience to get into it, especially if you know a little bit already. There's a spaced repetition schedule, and you're not aligned when you start. Caveats:

1) You don't see spaced repetition working until a few weeks in, once you're on a schedule.

2) You can't have gaps, so you can't just start in the middle.

3) If you know stuff, you need to keep with it until it gets into new stuff.

From there, it has to be done daily. If you miss 2-3 days, it's a chore to get back onto the schedule. I did it when I had a commute, so investing 30 minutes per day was easy. It added no time to my day, and by the end of 3 months, I knew /a lot/ of Chinese for not a lot of time invested. I was on-par with people who had roughly 2 years of college classes for speaking (but not reading or writing, which Pimsleur doesn't touch on). My accent was better too.

Once I finished, there was nowhere to go. Nothing else was nearly as efficient. I kind of plateaued. There are better tools now; this was many years ago.

I did the library/CDs route, so it was free.

I highly recommend the same path.

I haven't found anything good for writing Chinese. Does anyone have recommendations? Ideally, it'd leverage a pen tablet or iPad pencil or similar.

The best I've found for learning to write Chinese characters has been Skritter (https://skritter.com/) If you are following a textbook, you can probably find pre-made decks of characters for that textbook.

Skritter is pretty good for writing.

It worked for me when I studied Japanese, German and Russian, even though the language of instruction is English, which is not my native language. The trick is that you have to follow the instructions, not just "listen to some tapes". The Japanese course consists of 3*30 units, the recommendation is one 30 minute unit every day. Do that, no more, no less. It's not magic, even if you master all 90 units, that's just a very basic spoken proficiency. But it gives you that result reliably.

They added another 2 units for Japanese, it is a good method, certainly teach you the basics and how to get by if you are in Japan. You get to learn all the important patterns and many common words, the last 2 units add more casual speaking which is very important since people use it a lot, even in formal situations. My only grief with them is that they try to push Japanese culture and therefore use words that are not that common or useful, like "embroidery". It would be much better if they used the most common words of the language rather than not very useful vocabulary for a beginner.

I learned Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Polish, I knew English and Hebrew.

Every day I would usually repeat the previous day's lesson, and do a new lesson.

For languages such as Japanese and Chinese, you'd probably need to repeat it more than that. It's recommended that you know about 80% of the answers before moving on to the next lesson.