Comradeship // Freechat
Talk about whatever, respecting the rules established by Lemmygrad. Failing to comply with the rules will grant you a few warnings, insisting on breaking them will grant you a beautiful shiny banwall.
A community for comrades to chat and talk about whatever doesn't fit other communities
The Leader(Karl Marx cartoon) is on youtube w/ english captions
Hello Chinese is a freemium app I've used extensively. I'm supposedly up to hsk1 and I've enjoyed it a lot and have learned a lot. It will still take me a long time, but I feel like it's given me a foothold in pronunciation, vocab, hanzi, and that Im way more curious and excited to learn more. Would recommend.
Also pleco for an extensive dictionary/hanzi reference.
I second both of these. Hello Chinese is excellent, and while the thread question asks for free/cheap, I can't recommend premium enough. The podcasts are excellent, and the recently added character practice has helped me tremendously.
Pleco should be considered a baseline learning tool.
Good to know, I've thought about asking for a year of premium for my bday!
你好！
HelloTalk is a great app to meet language partners and native speaker friends, it’s monetized to hell though, so the best thing to do is meet people there, build a rapport, and get yourself someone willing to approve you for WeChat and talk to people there. Having a bunch of native speakers I talk to all the time has really helped me with my Chinese, and they’re all so kind and cool. Plus, they can teach you more native sounding language than you can learn from formal training, and slang. I’ve made multiple really good friends, and dozens of acquaintances. There’s even actual Chinese teachers on there, but I mostly just chat with people and we correct each other when we can.
Focus less on tones at first, and more on just internalizing the structures and characters. I have a notebook I use along with DuoLingo. Anytime it shows me a new character I write it down. I also write down most of the sentences of teaches me, and try to use those with my native language partners so they can correct me on it if needed. I’m up to 40 pages of notes so far, but it’s less overwhelming than I thought it would be. Writing really helps me hear the characters in my head when I see them later. If you do voice chat with native speakers, they can help you with your tones way better than duolingo’s tone training, so it’s better to just start talking to people as soon as you can I feel like.
Technically not free, but the Confucius Institute uses the 7-volume "New Practical Chinese Reader" textbooks that are as free as books can get on libgen.
Pirate pimsleurs. It will not teach you to write or read but it's pretty descent at teaching you to speak and listen. I speak a dialect of Mandarin but cannot understand a lick of Mandarin. Pimsleurs got me listening and speaking Mandarin at around a children's level in a couple months. I think writing and reading come easier once you can listen to it and speak it, at least it does for me. Make sure you're in an area where you can actually speak out loud.
Youtube has a ton of content. Utilize speed up/slow down. TPB has a massive torrent of Chinese learning material if you seek that out. Also check out your local library for books.
Check out Coursera, solid essential Mandarin course for free spanning several weeks that was good on tone work.