Learning Chinese Online with Social Mandarin

An important part of learning a new language is using it on a daily basis — reading it, speaking it, etc. We can practice verbal communication in Chinese with our friends but for a newbie who is learning to read and write Chinese, finding Chinese content on the web to follow can be tough.

Niel de la Rouviere, from South Africa, experienced the same pain when learning the Chinese language during his college days. He explained:

I started learning Mandarin in 2008 by attending University classes. Although the classes served as a great intro, I often came back after class looking for resources and interesting Mandarin links.

I spend most of my time online, thus I slowly started to amass interesting links, blogs and resources all across the web. This content was complementing my studies. I found interesting songs, learned new sentence constructions from bloggers and often just shared and talked about the processes of learning Chinese. It came to my realization that there is a gap for a community to form that shares online Mandarin resources with others. However, not only the resources, but also the people that go with it.

To close the gap, Niel, who is based in South Africa, built SocialMandarin.com to allow users to collect interesting Chinese content from across the web for other users. The content can range from songs, videos, and word lists to blog posts and newspaper articles. He believes that his site will help the online Chinese learner community to boost the pace of their improvement. ” I wish I had Social Mandarin when I started learning Mandarin,” he said.

Started in March 2010, Social Mandarin has gathered over 500 links for Chinese learners to choose from. The concept is interesting but it is now only available in English, and it’s a bit short on actual Chinese reading material. Many of the articles relate to Chinese culture, or share language learning tips and tricks — useful stuff, to be sure, but we’d love to see more links to Chinese sites, maybe with tags to indicate the difficulty level?

It also seems to be a pretty small community that’s contributing to the site right now. But hopefully as more people discover the site, and more people study Mandarin, things will pick up. For some Chinese learners, this site has the potential to be very helpful.