Read these first
Short explainers, none of them longer than two minutes, each covering something students get wrong repeatedly.
In Mandarin the pitch of a syllable is part of the word, exactly like a consonant. Change the pitch and you have changed the word, not your accent. This is the single thing beginners underestimate, and the reason a student who ignores tones for three months has to unlearn everything.
mā 妈 mother · má 麻 hemp · mǎ 马 horse · mà 骂 to scoldFirst tone is flat and high, like holding a note. Second rises, like a question. Third dips down then comes back up. Fourth drops sharply, like giving an order. Use the Hear the tone drill until you can tell them apart without looking — recognising them comes before producing them.
Pinyin uses the Latin alphabet but assigns several letters sounds that English does not give them. Read pinyin as if it were English and you will be unintelligible while being convinced you said it right.
q = roughly "ch" with a smile — qǐngx = roughly "sh" with a smile — xièxie
zh = "j" with the tongue pulled back — Zhōngguó
c = "ts" as in cats — cài
r = between English r and the z in azure — rén
Also: i after z, c, s, zh, ch, sh, r is not "ee". In shì it is a buzz, not a vowel you would recognise. Learn these five or six exceptions early and most of pinyin becomes reliable.
Characters are not letters and they are not pictures. Most are built from parts, and the parts often tell you something. Once you see the parts, memorising stops feeling like memorising random shapes.
女 woman + 子 child = 好 hǎo, good日 sun + 月 moon = 明 míng, bright
木 tree + 木 tree = 林 lín, woods
Stroke order matters too, and not for tradition: it is what makes handwriting legible and what dictionary lookup and handwriting input both assume. General rule — top before bottom, left before right, horizontal before crossing vertical. The Write it drill here checks your shape, not your stroke order, so use it to get the proportions into your hand and let a teacher watch your order.
Here is the good news, and it is genuinely good. Mandarin verbs do not conjugate. Nouns do not take plural endings. There is no grammatical gender and no articles. 我去 is "I go", 他去 is "he goes", 我明天去 is "I will go tomorrow" — the verb never changes.
The cost is that word order carries the information instead, and it is less flexible than Amharic or English. The reliable frame is:
Who + when + where + verb + object我 明天 去 工作 — I go to work tomorrow
Time goes near the front, never trailing at the end the way English allows. The Build the sentence drill trains exactly this, and it is the most common place a fluent-sounding beginner gives themselves away.
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Your progress is saved in this browser only. Nothing is sent to us. · The four courses
Practice is not a substitute for a class
A drill can tell you that you missed the tone. It cannot hear that your third tone is collapsing into a second one, or that your sh is too English, and it cannot fix your hand when your stroke order goes backwards. That is what a teacher is for.
Every level at Klick is one month — three sessions a week, two hours each, ETB 5,000 — and you decide each month whether to take the next one. Beginners are taught in Amharic, and every level ends with a filmed 60-second showcase of you speaking.