Chinese Workbooks for Complete Beginners

By Mei Lin

If you're starting Mandarin from zero, start here. Every workbook on this page assumes you know no Chinese at all. You'll learn one small, useful exchange at a time: saying hello, asking someone's name, ordering a coffee, reading a price.

Pronunciation comes early, because tones are easier to learn now than to fix later. Most workbooks pair a page to learn with a page to practise, so you can print one sheet, work through it in about twenty minutes and say the lines out loud. When these start to feel easy, move on to the HSK 1 workbooks.

16 workbooks, most downloaded first. Free with a SayMei account: each workbook's page shows its first two pages.