Is the whole course really free?

Yes. All 30 lessons are on this site with nothing to sign up for. We sell langNote, a separate paid app, and every lesson suggests using it — that suggestion is the only thing being sold here.

Simplified or traditional characters?

Simplified, as used in mainland China and Singapore. Traditional (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau) is a later, smaller step rather than a separate language, and many characters are identical in both.

Can you actually learn Chinese in 30 days?

You can reach roughly HSK 1–2: a real conversation about yourself, your family, your week and what you did at the weekend. You cannot read, and you will not have reliable tones under pressure. The box at the top lists both halves.

Do I have to learn characters?

This course teaches about 150 for recognition and asks you to handwrite only the ones you want to. Everyone, including native speakers, types using pinyin — which makes recognition worth far more than production at this stage. Day 3 explains the trade-off honestly.

How much time does it take each day?

25–35 minutes. Days 2, 11, 19 and 26 are the heavy ones, and days 7, 14, 21 and 30 are review days that run closer to 40 minutes because they are tests rather than new material.

What comes after day 30?

Day 30 names the order: characters seriously (1,000 is the target and the biggest single unlock), then 把 and 被, then result and direction complements, then the rest of 了.

30 Days of Chinese

Last revised: 2026-08 · 30 lessons · about 16 hours in total

Thirty lessons, 25–35 minutes each, in Mandarin with simplified characters. Chinese is the mirror image of a European language: the grammar is close to free — no conjugation, no tenses, no gender, no cases, no plurals, no articles — and everything you save there is spent on tone, characters, measure words and one particle called 了. This course puts day 1 entirely on tones and then keeps scoring them at every checkpoint, because tone is the thing that decays first and matters most.

What 30 days does and does not get you

On day 30 you will be able to

Produce all four tones and read pinyin correctly, including the traps (c, q, x, zh, and the i that is a buzz).
Split a character into its meaning half and its sound half, and recognise roughly 150 of them.
Introduce yourself and your family and talk for five minutes without stopping.
Count things properly with measure words, handle prices, order a meal and bargain in a market.
Say what happened using 了 and 过, and what you can, want and must do.

You will still not be able to

Read. 150 characters is a foundation, not literacy — a newspaper assumes around 3,000, and day 30 names characters as the single biggest thing to do next.
Hold your tones reliably when you are tired, nervous or excited. Everyone's slip; the fix is speaking, not studying.
Use result and direction complements (吃完, 听懂, 走进去), which are extremely common and are not in this course.
Produce 把 and 被 sentences. You will recognise 把, because 请把… is how requests are phrased.
Follow two native speakers at speed, or handle a strong regional accent.

What this is, and who wrote it

We make langNote, a paid app that turns your own study material into practice. This course is free, complete, and works on paper or on a screen with nothing installed — the lessons below are the whole thing, not a sample with the good parts removed.

The reason it exists is that it was written for a real 30-day attempt at Mandarin Chinese, and material written to actually be used is different from material written to rank. Every lesson ends with a note on how to run that day's page through the app, because that is how the author studied it. Ignore those boxes and the course still works.

The daily routine (20–30 minutes)

Read the lesson — say every example out loud. (8 min)
Do the exercises and check the answers. (5 min)
Today's 10 sentences, out loud, three times each. (5 min)
Practise the day's dialogue or drill. (7 min)
Optional: one conversation on the day's topic. (5 min)

One rule: never read silently, and never write a word without its tone mark. A note that says 'ma = mother' is worse than useless — it teaches you a word you cannot say. In Chinese, pitch is spelling.

The grammar is nearly free — and the tones are not

Chinese has no verb conjugation, no tenses, no gender, no cases, no plurals, no articles and no agreement of any kind. 去 means go, goes, went and will go, unchanged. Word order and a handful of particles carry everything, which means the grammar you have to memorise is genuinely small compared with any European language.

The cost is tone. mā, má, mǎ and mà are four different words, and tone is part of the word the way a consonant is. The specific problem for English speakers is that English already uses pitch — for emotion and emphasis, across the sentence — so the two systems collide. You cannot ask a question by raising your voice, because raising your voice rewrites the last word. Day 1 is that, days 6 and 29 come back to it, and every review day scores your tone accuracy separately from everything else.

The other two costs are characters and measure words. Characters are less arbitrary than they look — over 80% are a meaning half plus a sound half, so 妈 is 女 (woman) plus 马 (mǎ), and day 3 teaches you to split them rather than memorise shapes. Measure words are the thing English mostly lacks; day 11 gives you the fifteen that matter and then tells you to say 个 and keep talking whenever you are unsure.

The 30 lessons

Each lesson is a full page: tables, dialogues, pronunciation notes, exercises and answers. Start at day 1 — the later lessons assume the earlier ones.

Week 1 — Tones, pinyin and characters

Four tones, the sound traps, how characters work, and your first sentences.

Week 2 — Numbers, 的 and measure words

Prices, dates, family, counting things, and ordering a meal.

Week 3 — Places, plans and permission

在, directions, transport, bargaining, and the three words for 'can'.

Week 4 — Word order, 了 and real speech

不 vs 没, the future, the past, and joining sentences up.

Questions

Is the whole course really free?: Yes. All 30 lessons are on this site with nothing to sign up for. We sell langNote, a separate paid app, and every lesson suggests using it — that suggestion is the only thing being sold here.
Simplified or traditional characters?: Simplified, as used in mainland China and Singapore. Traditional (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau) is a later, smaller step rather than a separate language, and many characters are identical in both.
Can you actually learn Chinese in 30 days?: You can reach roughly HSK 1–2: a real conversation about yourself, your family, your week and what you did at the weekend. You cannot read, and you will not have reliable tones under pressure. The box at the top lists both halves.
Do I have to learn characters?: This course teaches about 150 for recognition and asks you to handwrite only the ones you want to. Everyone, including native speakers, types using pinyin — which makes recognition worth far more than production at this stage. Day 3 explains the trade-off honestly.
How much time does it take each day?: 25–35 minutes. Days 2, 11, 19 and 26 are the heavy ones, and days 7, 14, 21 and 30 are review days that run closer to 40 minutes because they are tests rather than new material.
What comes after day 30?: Day 30 names the order: characters seriously (1,000 is the target and the biggest single unlock), then 把 and 被, then result and direction complements, then the rest of 了.

langNote is a paid subscription and this course recommends it. The 30 lessons are free and complete either way.