PART I: OPENING Q&A AND GENERAL MYTH-BUSTING

“Learning Mandarin is really hard. It's a category 5 language for English speakers. It's impossible!”

source

All those difficulty discussions are really saying is that Mandarin takes a while to learn. Per the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) an easier language like Spanish takes ≈23-24 weeks (or 575-600 hours) for basic fluency whereas Mandarin takes ≈88 weeks (or 2200 hours) for basic fluency. So about 4x longer to learn Mandarin than Spanish or say, Afrikaans. Either way learning a language is like eating a large elephant one bite at a time. If the Mandarin elephant is 4 times bigger, you just have to take significant, but livable bites out of the the Mandarin elephant for that many more days.

PART II: MINDSET

PART III: RESOURCES

The backbone of this entire program, "How to Remember Anything Forever-ish". Read it. Then read it again. Here's a schedule for your shoeboxes or if you are like me, manila envelopes; this Repetition Schedule should help.

Sequence of reading.

https://4chanint.fandom.com/wiki/The_Official_/int/_How_to_Learn_A_Foreign_Language_Guide_Wiki

https://4chanint.fandom.com/wiki/General_Resources

https://4chanint.fandom.com/wiki/Mandarin_Chinese

https://teachyourselfmandarin.wordpress.com/

Discord Servers: /r/ChineseLanguage, 中英交流 Chinese-English Language Exchange

PART IV: LEARNING MANDARIN

Normally its OK to jump around a guide as your whims take you. DO NOT DO THAT HERE UNTIL YOU LEARN PINYIN. Do not bother with strokes and so on until you know your pinyin fairly well.

Pinyin

Use AnkiDroid + Yoyo Chinese YouTube Channel to fill out your spaced repetition cards. Click here for the Yoyo Chinese Pinyin Playlist

Strokes

Skritter App https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.inkren.skritter.chinese&hl=en&gl=US

Radicals

Skritter App

Characters

Grammar and Conversation

PART V: MEASURING PROGRESS

PART VI: MORE QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

PART VII: THANKS

Thanks to Nicky Case for her invaluable research into pedagogy. And to 4chan for being the best proof there is that people as groups deserve trust and that individualism is cancer.