The idea that Mandarin grammar is easy only really applies at a surface level. Yeah for the most part it's SVO word order and there aren't any verb conjugations, but the deeper you get, the more you run into constructions that are completely alien from an English-speaker's perspective. I like how this image represents it: https://imgur.com/neBFnxc
The first book actually only contains the most common (by their methodology) 1000 characters:
> "The 55 lessons from Book 1 cover the 1,000 most commonly used characters in the Chinese writing system, plus another 500 included either because they are needed to preserve the logical ordering of the material or because they are especially easy to learn at this early stage."
Those 500 are still from the most common ~3000 total that comprise both books at least, but it means that you really have to learn 1500 characters before you're guaranteed to know the most common 1000. And learn all 3000 before you're guaranteed to know the most common 1500.
I've been going so slowly it's taken me years to reach my current point of character #2170, but eventually I'll get there, even if I've already been reading sentences with characters that I haven't gotten to yet for a while now.
There's tons of free content to keep you occupied for a while, and then there's a paid tier if you want more down the track. After choosing the level that's suitable, I recommend starting with Pablo's videos - he's the founder and I still like his style the most, particularly his older videos before things expanded. Just click on whatever looks interesting.
Thanks! I've been on it for some time. I can understand Beginner level most of time, even with 1.25x or 1.5x for most of the videos, but I find most of Intermediate can be significantly harder to understand. One possibility is that the there are more idiomatic phrases in Intermediate, like the use of reflexive verbs, such as hacerse, levarse, ponerse, irse and etc under different context. They are so different from English and I still need to translate them instead of comprehending them.
Keep at it, consistently doing a bit every day, and you'll get there. I went through all the free beginner videos (at the time) before moving onto intermediate, then did the same before moving onto advanced, and only then was I really able to start watching stuff made for native speakers without feeling too lost. I'm not a CI purist though, I looked up words or grammar points occasionally, but I didn't actively try to study or memorize anything.
The main thing learners utilizing comprehensible input need is volume, so if you actually want to make it useful as more than a one-off novelty, your priority kind of needs to be in pumping out the content (while keeping it relatively interesting since that's also important). That's really the hard part. I will also say that I'm not personally convinced that "here's the words you heard, now tap them in order" minigames are very helpful. Other than that, the features and functionality are nice. Reminds me of Duolingo stories, which is their best content IMO.
Thanks a lot, I appreciate the feedback! Indeed, Duolingo Stories are the part of Duolingo I enjoyed the most too.
Taping words: I sometimes find it useful to focus my listening and try to recognize the words. But I'm not sure about the design here and maybe I should disable it by default. Thanks again!
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> "Since 2024 the capital ⟨ẞ⟩ is preferred over ⟨SS⟩."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9F
Check reference #5 and compare it to the older wording in reference #12.