Learning Chinese: A Foundation Course in Mandarin
A complete online textbook covering the first four semesters (two years) of MIT's Mandarin Chinese program, the same material that later became the basis for a Yale University Press print textbook. The course separates oral and literary skills, presenting spoken material in pinyin and reading material in characters, so learners build pronunciation and conversation ability alongside character recognition and reading. It includes the full text online plus accompanying audio recordings for listening and pronunciation practice, letting a self-directed learner work through the entire foundation sequence from beginner to intermediate Mandarin. Materials are provided by MIT OpenCourseWare under a Creative Commons license, free to access with no certificate offered. This is a self-study resource rather than an instructor-led class, but its scope, two years of structured coursework, is unusually complete for a free language resource.