In my last post, I argued that to learn more Mandarin, you need to study less. The more apps, courses and textbooks you juggle, the less any of them actually works.

The obvious follow-up question is: okay, so what should I keep?

After nearly seven years of learning Mandarin, here’s my honest answer. You only need three resources to learn Mandarin and get to fluency:

1. YouTube
2. Podcasts
3. A spaced repetition system (SRS)

That’s it. Two give you input, one makes sure it sticks. Add real conversations on top, and you’ve got everything you need.

Let’s go through each one, why it earns its place, and how to get the most out of it.

1. YouTube: input you can see

YouTube is the best free Mandarin resource on the planet, and it’s the one I’d start with.

Why it earns its place:

• Visual context makes input understandable. When you can see what people are doing, pointing at and reacting to, you can follow far more than you could from audio alone. That’s huge at lower levels.
• There’s content for every level. From slow, learner-focused channels to street interviews, vlogs and full TV dramas, you never run out of things to watch.
• Subtitles make sentence mining easy. Almost every Mandarin video has subtitles. That makes it quick to look up words and pull out useful sentences to review later.

Channels I recommend:

• Mandarin Corner: huge variety, from street interviews to walk-around vlogs. Brilliant for getting from lower to upper intermediate.
• 大叔中文 Dashu Mandarin: slightly harder, and one of my favourites. Nearly every learner I speak to loves it.
• My own channel, where I talk about how I learn and share lots of practical chunks.

How to use it well:

• Use Mandarin subtitles, not English ones, as soon as you can.
• As your level grows, move from learner channels to content made for native speakers: vlogs, interviews and TV shows.
• Don’t just watch passively all the time. When a sentence jumps out as useful, note it down.

2. Podcasts: input you can take anywhere

If YouTube is where you learn to understand Mandarin, podcasts are where you learn to understand it without help.

Why they earn their place:

• No subtitles. Podcasts force your ears to do the work. They’re the best antidote to becoming over-reliant on subtitles, and the fastest way to get comfortable with native-speed speech.
• They turn dead time into Mandarin time. Commuting, cooking, cleaning, walking, going to the gym: you can listen during all of it. This is how you get one to two hours of Mandarin a day without “finding” extra time.
• Real conversation. Many podcasts are two or more people chatting naturally, which is exactly the kind of Mandarin you want to understand and eventually speak.

Podcasts I recommend:

• Lower levels: Tea Time Chinese, which I recommend a lot.
• Intermediate: 大鹏说中文 Speak Chinese with Da Peng, entirely in Chinese, with clear explanations of everyday expressions.
• Higher levels: 霓达播客 and 大人的Small Talk, both made for native speakers.

You’ll find all of these on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. If you want a huge range of native Chinese podcasts, it’s also worth trying 小宇宙 (Xiaoyuzhou), China’s most popular podcast app.

Bonus: audiobooks. I treat audiobooks as part of this category. They’re brilliant for vocabulary and for keeping motivation up with a story you actually want to finish. I personally use 番茄小说.

How to use them well:

• Pick podcasts you’d genuinely enjoy listening to. Interest keeps you consistent.
• Don’t worry about understanding everything. Aim for the gist and let your brain do the rest.
• If something keeps coming up that you don’t understand, look it up and add it to your review.
• If you come across a useful sentence which has vocab/chunks in that you think you’ll need in real conversations put it into you spaced repetition system.

3. A spaced repetition system: making it stick

Input is where you meet new Mandarin. But if you only meet a useful sentence once, it’s gone a week later. That’s where a spaced repetition system (SRS) comes in.

An SRS shows you material just before you’re about to forget it. Things you know well come up less and less often; things you struggle with come up more. It’s the most efficient way I know to hold on to what you learn, and repetition is key for successful learning.

Flashcards have been a huge part of my journey. I’ve made over 20,000 of them, and with good cards my daily reviews still only take around 15 to 20 minutes.

What to put in it: useful sentences and chunks you’ve found in your YouTube videos and podcasts. Not single words, and not someone else’s pre-made deck. Your flashcards should be personal, built from the Mandarin you actually want to use.

Why I now use the Fluency Trainer

For years I used Anki. But Anki is mostly built for recognition: you see something and remember what it means. If your goal is to speak, you need to practice production: building sentences yourself, out loud.

That’s why I built the Fluency Trainer:

• You build whole sentences from English, the way you do in a real conversation, rather than filling in gaps.
• It forces you to say them out loud, so you’re training your mouth as well as your memory.
• It’s designed around chunks, so you learn ready-made pieces you can slot together on the spot instead of translating word by word.
• You can add your own sentences from your input in one click (generates the pinyin audio and English automatically), so your reviews stay personal and you’ll save a ton of time making flashcards.

All in all, the Fluency Trainer is designed for learners who want to reap the benefits of flashcards specifically to improve their speaking.

If you’re curious how it compares, I wrote a full Anki vs. Fluency Trainer comparison.

What about speaking?

You might have noticed there’s no “speaking resource” on this list. That’s deliberate.

Speaking isn’t something you get from an app. It comes from real conversations with real people: friends, a language exchange partner or a tutor. That’s where the sentences from your SRS start coming out naturally, and where you find the gaps, the things you wanted to say but couldn’t. Those gaps become your next sentences to review.

So think of it like this: YouTube and podcasts are the input, the SRS is the bridge, and conversations are where it all gets put to use.

What you don’t need

Here’s what you can happily cut, or at least stop feeling guilty about:

• Multiple flashcard apps. One SRS is enough.
• Stacks of textbooks. One can be helpful at the very start, but you’ll learn far more from real input.
• Endless grammar courses. Grammar sinks in through chunks and exposure, not memorised rules.
• Gamified apps you use for the streak. If the streak is the goal, it isn’t helping you speak.
• Hours of handwriting practice, unless writing by hand is genuinely one of your goals.

Putting it all together

Here’s what a day with just these three resources might look like:

• Morning commute: a podcast episode.
• Lunch break: a YouTube video with Mandarin subtitles. Note down two or three useful sentences.
• Evening: 15 to 20 minutes of reviews in the Fluency Trainer, adding the sentences you found today in a click of a button.
• A few times a week: a conversation in Mandarin.

Simple, repeatable, and it adds up to one to two hours of Mandarin a day without feeling like a chore. If you want to see how this works in practice, here’s my full Mandarin study routine.

FAQ

What are the best resources to learn Mandarin?

For most learners: YouTube, podcasts and a spaced repetition system. Together they give you plenty of real input and a way to make it stick. Add regular conversations and you have everything you need.

Can you learn Mandarin for free?

Almost entirely. YouTube and podcasts are free, and so are conversations with friends or exchange partners. The only thing worth considering paying for is a good SRS, because it decides how much of your input actually sticks.

Why is it worth paying for? Because a good SRS saves you two things free tools usually cost you: time and speaking practice.

• It’s built for speaking, not just recognition. Most free flashcard apps train you to recognise Mandarin. A speaking-focused SRS has you build sentences and say them out loud, which is exactly what you need to do in a real conversation.
• It does the boring work for you. Making flashcards by hand means typing out the Chinese, adding pinyin, finding a translation and recording or downloading audio for every single card. Do that for thousands of sentences and you’ve lost hours and hours that could have gone into listening or speaking.
• It keeps you consistent. When adding a sentence takes one click instead of five minutes, you actually do it, so your reviews keep growing with the Mandarin you’re meeting every day.

That’s exactly why I built the Fluency Trainer: add a sentence in one click, and it generates the pinyin, audio and English for you, so your time goes into practicing, not hunting for English translations.

Do I need a textbook to learn Mandarin?

Not really. A textbook can help with the basics in your first few weeks, but after that I think you’ll probably find you make far more progress from real input and reviewing useful sentences.

Three resources, done well

You don’t need ten resources to learn Mandarin. You need three, used consistently: YouTube, podcasts and an SRS.

If you want an SRS built specifically for speaking, give my Fluency Trainer a try. You can also sign up to my free email course for more tips like this.

What are your favourite Mandarin YouTube channels and podcasts? Let me know in the comments here or on my YouTube channel.