How to start learning Chinese from scratch

October 13, 2026 · 10 min read

When you learn Chinese from scratch, you don’t start with characters — you start with sound. The first week goes to pinyin and tones, then come your first words by ear, short phrases and a few characters a day. This order works with a teacher and just as well if you’re teaching yourself at home. Below is a step-by-step plan for beginners: where to start, what you need, how long it takes and what you can do for free.

Chinese has a scary reputation because of characters and tones, but the rest of it is simpler than you’d think. There are no verb endings, no plurals, no genders, no articles — words never change their form. The hard part sits in two places: pronunciation and writing. How hard that really is, we look at in Is Chinese hard to learn?

Can you learn Chinese on your own at home?

Yes — at least to a solid beginner and intermediate level. But not everything works equally well alone, and it helps to know that in advance.

• Works on your own: words, reading, grammar, characters. Here an answer is either right or wrong, so checking yourself is easy: you remembered the word or you didn’t, you understood the sentence or you didn’t, you wrote the character in stroke order or you slipped.
• Works on your own: listening. All you need is native recordings and the habit of listening to every new word instead of only reading it.
• Needs a check: pronunciation. You can’t hear your own tones from the inside: it feels like your voice went up, but it stayed flat. Without an outside ear, the mistake sets in. The check can come from a teacher, a native speaker or a program that compares your voice with a model — for example, the pronunciation trainer.
• Needs a partner: real conversation. Speaking fast and without preparation is learned only by talking. It isn’t urgent in the first months, but by HSK 3 you’ll want some practice.

The bottom line: you can learn Chinese from zero by yourself, as long as you have sound from the first week and a way to check your pronunciation.

What you need to start: a dictionary, an app, a practice sheet

You don’t have to buy anything. Four tools are enough to get going, and nearly all of them are free.

• A syllable chart with audio. This is what you use to set up your pronunciation in the first week. Every syllable in every tone is in the pinyin chart.
• A course or a textbook. It sets the order: what to learn today and what to review. How a book, video lessons and an online course differ — in our article on teaching yourself Chinese.
• A dictionary. In Chinese it’s 词典 cídiǎn — dictionary. You need it for everything you meet outside lessons: a sign, a word from a song, a message. A phone dictionary with handwriting input is the most convenient — you can draw an unknown character with your finger. Which apps exist and how to combine them — in our guide to apps for learning Chinese.
• Practice sheets. A character — 汉字 Hànzì — Chinese character — is remembered by the hand. Grid paper will do, or our character practice sheets, which show the stroke order.

How to learn Chinese from scratch: step 1 — pinyin and tones

Pinyin is the way Chinese sounds are written in Latin letters. Without it you can’t read a new word: a character doesn’t show how it sounds. Tones are the four melodies a syllable can have, and the meaning depends on them. The first week is enough for both: Chinese has only about four hundred syllables.

Careful with the letters, though: pinyin is not English spelling. x isn’t “ks”, q isn’t “k”, and zh, c, r mean other sounds too. All syllables with audio are in the pinyin chart, and how to tell one tone from another is in our article on Chinese tones.

Step 2. First words for beginners — by ear and out loud

Start with ten or so words you’ll need in any conversation. Listen to each one and repeat it out loud — a tone sticks only through your voice.

• 你好nǐhǎohello
• 谢谢xièxiethank you
• 我wǒI, me
• 你nǐyou
• 是shìto be
• 不bùnot

More phrases for a first conversation are in How to say hello and thank you in Chinese. And all the words of the first level, sorted by topic, are in the HSK 1 word list: there are three hundred of them.

Step 3. Phrases instead of rules

At the beginning, grammar is mostly word order — and it’s the same as in English: who, does what, to what. To ask a yes/no question, add the particle ma at the end. To say no, put 不 “not” before the verb. That’s enough for dozens of sentences:

• 他是老师tāshìlǎoshīhe’s a teacher
• 他不是老师tābúshìlǎoshīhe’s not a teacher
• 你是学生吗？nǐshìxuéshengmaare you a student?

Don’t learn rules as a list. Take one model sentence and swap the words in it: “he’s a teacher”, “she’s a student”, “I’m not a teacher”. Notice that 是 never changes — there is no “am / is / are” to learn. Grammar sinks in on its own this way.

Step 4. Characters — from day one, but a few at a time

Don’t put characters off “for later”: the longer you learn words only through pinyin, the harder it is to move on to real texts. But memorizing characters as pictures doesn’t work either.

• Look at the parts. A character is built from components that repeat in hundreds of others. Once you know them, you take a new character apart instead of copying it line by line. The most common ones are in our article on radicals.
• Write in stroke order. Strokes go in a set sequence — top to bottom, left to right. Your hand remembers a character faster than your eye does.
• Three to five characters a day. At the first level you need to recognize 246 characters — at that pace it takes about two months.

Step 5. Review on a schedule

A word fades if you never come back to it, and it stays for good if you recall it right before you would have forgotten it: after a day, then three days, then a week. Keeping that schedule by hand is hard, so people usually leave it to software. In our course, words come back for review on the right day by themselves.

How long does it take to learn Chinese from scratch?

It depends on what “learn” means. A handy yardstick is the levels of the HSK exam: each one has a word list and a clear result. The table assumes one lesson of the course a day — about ten minutes plus word review.

Word counts follow the new HSK 3.0 syllabus. The times cover new material only: reviewing what you’ve learned comes on top, so leave some slack. Studying more will get you there faster, but only if you’re consistent. Short daily sessions beat two hours once a week: Chinese is built on review. A detailed breakdown by level is in our guide to preparing for the HSK.

What a fifteen-minute session at home can look like:

• Five minutes — review. The words due today: hear each one, recall the meaning, say it out loud.
• Seven minutes — something new. One lesson: five or six words and one model sentence where you swap the words.
• Three minutes — your hand. Three characters from today’s words, each a few times, in stroke order.

Learning Chinese from scratch for free, or with a course

You can get through the whole first stage for free: set up your pronunciation, learn your first words and phrases, start writing. Open materials are enough for that — a syllable chart, word lists, video lessons, the free parts of courses — along with our reference of HSK words.

After that, the free route runs into a different problem: not too little material, but too much. You have to decide yourself what to learn tomorrow, when to review and who will check you. A course takes that on — it gives you a program, a review schedule and feedback. With Nomto there’s nothing to pay right now: during the beta the whole course, from HSK 1 to HSK 6, is free with an account, and the trainers and the first section of HSK 1 work even without one. How to compare courses and what to look at before you pay anyone — in our article on online Chinese courses.

Five common mistakes

• Putting tones off. “Words first, pronunciation later” — and every word ends up learned wrong.
• Learning words without sound. A word you’ve never heard is a word you won’t recognize in speech.
• Relying on “sounds-like” spellings instead of pinyin. “Nee how” or “shay shay” have no tones, and they write different sounds the same way.
• Copying characters as whole pictures. Without components and stroke order, every character is a new image, and they soon start to blur together.
• Studying rarely and for long. Fifteen minutes every day beats two hours on Sundays.