The best Chinese learning blogs & websites

Apps teach you words. Blogs and websites teach you how to study, which is the part most learners get wrong for years. A good learner blog saves you from mistakes its author already made, and a good reference site answers the grammar question your app skipped.

The trouble with lists like this one is that blogs die quietly. Kungfucius opened every site below on 14 November 2026 and noted the date of the latest post. Where a blog has gone silent but the archive is still worth reading, that is stated.

The sites at a glance

Site	What it is	Best for	Level	Latest post seen
Hacking Chinese	Blog on how to learn Mandarin	Method and study strategy	All	Nov 2026
I'm Learning Mandarin	Learner blog and podcast	Speaking, tones, the intermediate plateau	Intermediate	Mar 2026
Mandarin Zest	Blog, free tools, materials shop	Free practice tools, HSK and TOCFL lists, Taiwan	Beginner to intermediate	Nov 2026
Hack Chinese	Vocabulary app with a small blog	Vocabulary lists and spaced repetition	All	Jul 2023 (blog)
Sinosplice	Personal blog on Chinese and China	Language observations, characters	Intermediate up	Jun 2026
Chinese Grammar Wiki	Grammar reference	Looking up any grammar point	A1 to C1	Reference, maintained
Du Chinese blog	App company blog	HSK 3.0 news, reading advice	Beginner to intermediate	Oct 2026
DigMandarin	Guides and resource reviews	Beginner guides, tool round-ups	Beginner	Jan 2026
Chinese Boost	Grammar guides, dictionary, exercises	Grammar with example sentences	Beginner to intermediate	Reference, maintained
MDBG	Free web dictionary	Lookups on a computer	All	Reference, maintained
Chinese-Forums	Discussion forum	Asking specific questions	All	Nov 2026

The four Kungfucius reads first

Hacking Chinese

Hacking Chinese is Olle Linge's site, running since 2010. It does not teach Chinese. It teaches how to learn Chinese: how to practise tones, how to remember characters, how to listen more, how to plan. There are hundreds of articles sorted by skill and level, monthly study challenges and a podcast version of most posts. It was still publishing weekly in November 2026.

Who it suits: anyone studying on their own, at any level. Weakness: the archive is so large that reading about studying can replace studying. Start with the beginner or "essential articles" section and stop there for a month.

I'm Learning Mandarin

I'm Learning Mandarin is the blog and podcast of Mischa Wilmers, who began learning in 2017 while working full time in the UK. It is strongest on the questions adult self-learners actually have: fixing tones late, how long fluency takes, and getting off the intermediate plateau without moving to China. The podcast features interviews with researchers and with learners who succeeded.

Who it suits: intermediate learners whose speaking has stalled. Weakness: the site now leads with a paid coaching programme, and blog posts have become occasional. The older guides are the reason to visit.

Mandarin Zest

Mandarin Zest is run by Antoine and Dorota, two European learners of Chinese. By its own account it began as a newsletter written in Brussels after the two had studied together in Taiwan. Today it is a blog with a set of free tools: an HSK level test, the new HSK and the TOCFL vocabulary lists, a stroke-order tool, a practice-sheet generator and trainers for Pinyin and Bopomofo (Zhuyin). The blog posts several times a month.

Who it suits: beginners and lower-intermediate learners, and especially anyone learning Traditional characters or heading for Taiwan, a group most sites forget. Weakness: it is also a shop for textbooks, a paid club and bootcamps, so expect to be invited to buy something.

Hack Chinese

Hack Chinese is first of all a tool, not a blog: a spaced repetition trainer made only for Mandarin vocabulary, with ready-made lists for HSK, TOCFL and common textbooks. It is easy to confuse with Hacking Chinese. The two are unrelated: one is an app, the other a blog.

Its blog holds a small number of solid articles on vocabulary learning, such as how to remember characters and how to learn 150 basic words in 15 days. Weakness: the last blog post Kungfucius found is from July 2023, so read it as an archive. The app is a paid subscription.

Reference sites: grammar and dictionaries

• Chinese Grammar Wiki, run by AllSet Learning in Shanghai. Free, more than 2,100 articles, sorted by level from A1 to C1 and by HSK level, each with example sentences in characters and Pinyin. This is the answer to "where can I find Chinese grammar explanations". Weakness: it is a reference, so it tells you what a pattern means but gives you no practice.
• Chinese Boost. Free grammar guides, example sentences and a dictionary, with exercises on top. A free account is limited, and Pro is listed at US$8 a month. Weakness: smaller grammar coverage than the wiki.
• MDBG. The long-running free web dictionary built on the open CC-CEDICT data, with wildcard search and a tool that annotates a whole pasted text. It is what to use at a desk when Pleco is on your phone. Weakness: definitions are lists of English equivalents with little guidance on usage.

Blogs and sites from the people who make the tools

• Sinosplice. John Pasden has written about Chinese and life in Shanghai since the early 2000s, and he is also the founder of AllSet Learning. Posts are now a few a year, short and observant: odd characters, puns, signs. Weakness: it is a personal blog, not a study guide.
• Du Chinese blog. Clear articles from the makers of the Du Chinese reader, including useful explainers on the new HSK 3.0 in autumn 2026. Weakness: it recommends its own app at every opportunity, as company blogs do.
• DigMandarin. A large collection of beginner guides on pronunciation, characters and the HSK, plus round-ups of resources. Weakness: new articles are rare now, and some reviews are old. Check dates.
• Chinese-Forums. The old meeting place of serious learners, with two decades of threads on textbooks, universities in China and Taiwan, and obscure grammar. Still receiving new posts. Weakness: traffic is lower than it used to be, and some new threads are thinly disguised advertising. Search the archive first.

More sites worth a look

• Danyo Pang's newsletter ("Chinese Speakers by Danyo Pang"). A Substack about speaking Mandarin like the locals, written by a learner who started at 30. Short, practical and firmly against textbook drills. Weakness: it also promotes the author's paid courses.
• Mandarin Bean. Graded reading texts from beginner to advanced, tagged by HSK level, with audio, Pinyin and one-tap translations in Simplified or Traditional characters. The reading lessons are free. Weakness: it is a reader, not a blog, so there is little to learn about method.
• Hanzi Guide. A free tool for learning to write characters, with animated stroke order for Simplified and Traditional forms and audio in Mandarin and Cantonese. Weakness: a reference, not a course.
• Magnetic Memory Method. Anthony Metivier's site on memory techniques such as the memory palace, with free tutorials on using them for languages. Useful if characters will not stick. Weakness: it is about memory in general, not Chinese in particular.
• Fluent in Mandarin. A blog with learning tips, travel phrases and notes on life in China, next to the site's courses. Weakness: the newest post Kungfucius found is from December 2024.
• Shaolin Chinese. The site of a Mandarin school in India that prepares for HSK, HSKK, BCT and TOCFL, with a blog on characters, grammar and culture. Weakness: it is first of all a school's shop window.

Forums and social media

Blogs tell you what one person thinks. Forums tell you what a hundred learners argue about.

• Forumosa. The long-running forum of foreigners in Taiwan. Its language sections carry regular updates on learning Chinese in Taiwan: schools, visas for language students, events and Taiwan-specific questions.
• Reddit: r/ChineseLanguage. The largest general forum for learners of Chinese. Good for quick answers and resource threads. Expect the same beginner questions every week.
• Threads. Very active in Taiwan. Search for 學中文 or 語言交換 to find teachers, learners and language partners.
• X. Still where many teachers, app makers and researchers post short tips and announcements. Follow the authors of the sites above and prune often.

What happened to the older recommendations

An earlier version of this list included several sites that Kungfucius can no longer recommend in the same way.

• All Japanese All The Time (AJATT), the blog that inspired many immersion learners of Chinese as well, did not load when checked.
• Mandarin Companion still sells its graded readers, but its blog has not been updated since 2023.
• FluentU's Chinese blog is still online and publishes a lot. It is written to sell a subscription, and the articles are of mixed quality.
• The German site chinalernen.de and the Spanish site chinoyespanol.com did not load. The French site apprendrelechinois.fr is now a sentence-analysis tool, not a blog.

How to choose between HSK-focused and Taiwan-focused sites

Most sites assume Simplified characters and the mainland HSK. If you are learning in Taiwan, look for Traditional characters, Zhuyin and the TOCFL: Mandarin Zest covers these, and MDBG lets you switch to Traditional. The difference between the two scripts is explained under Simplified vs Traditional.

What to do with this list

1. Bookmark the Chinese Grammar Wiki and MDBG. You will use them weekly for years.
2. Read five Hacking Chinese articles in the section for your level, and change one thing in your routine because of them.
3. If your speaking has stalled, read the tone and plateau guides on I'm Learning Mandarin.
4. Try the free tools on Mandarin Zest once, and keep the ones you would use again.
5. Then close the browser. Reading about learning Chinese is pleasant, and it is not the same activity as learning Chinese.

For the tools themselves, see the best apps to learn Chinese and the best podcasts to learn Chinese.