Free Chinese (Simplified) learning resources
1 free resource, checked and categorised.
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Chinese separates cleanly into two problems, and treating them as one is what makes it feel impossible. The grammar is genuinely simple — no conjugation, no tenses, no gender, no plurals. The writing system and the tones are the whole difficulty, and they are largely independent of each other.
Start tones on day one, in whole words rather than in isolation. Tones learned late are extremely hard to fix, because you will have spent months building muscle memory for the wrong shape. Do not treat them as an advanced topic.
For characters, learn them as combinations of repeating components rather than as pictures to memorise. Most characters contain a part hinting at meaning and a part hinting at sound; once you see that, the several-thousand-character mountain becomes a few hundred pieces recombined.
Pinyin is a useful bridge and a trap if you stay on it. Move to characters early, keep a dictionary that handles handwriting or component lookup, and expect reading to lag speaking for a long time.
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Free resources are great for input — reading, listening, explanations. They are weaker at the two things that actually move you forward: speaking Chinese (Simplified) out loud, and remembering what you met once. That is what OwnSlides is for.
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This directory began from a community-built list of free language resources — a year of collecting and checking by Joanna (u/chlebka) and dozens of contributors who suggested links, shared freely. See the original list. We have since expanded, re-checked and re-categorised it, and we keep the per-resource credits where the original list recorded them.