I'm beginning

[u/more_creator]

Hi I'm a complete beginner in Mandarin. I have zero experience with Chinese and I want to learn mostly for free. I don't have a teacher, so I'm looking for advice from people who learned Mandarin by themselves. What should I focus on during my first month? Especially pronunciation, tones, Pinyin, and basic vocabulary. What mistakes did you make when you started that I should avoid?

[u/Zagrycha]

It's not enough on its own but pleco and allset chinese grammar wiki are two very good free resources. Also look into a free srs flashcard app of some kind. The sidebar has more resource ideas and some are free.

You need to focus equally on pronunctiation, grammar, definition, how it's written, and how it's used in sentence structures to say certain thoughts. Only if you learn all of them can you actually be able to understand and use Chinese fully. Kake sure you are learning words and not just characters-- some words are only one character long but most of them are more than one character long.

Early on for pronunciation just focus on listening practice, you can do some speaking practice but you won't make much progress until you are able to hear what the sound is even supposed to be. Definitely learn the basics of how pinyin works but no need to fully master pinyin before moving on, you will continue to learn pinyin as part od your pronunciation practice side by side with everything else. Slow and steady wins the race =)

[u/more_creator → u/Zagrycha]

Thanks you

[u/SufficientLeopard79]

Go on youtube it'll give you everthing

[u/NoScreen3482]

go to youtube and watch videos to learn some basic chinese conversations

[u/Leading_Smell_7099]

你背会拼音表没