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Did you study Chinese at home and then find that once you arrived in China you couldn’t understand a word anyone said? Don’t feel bad, seriously, you are not the first or the last person who has experienced this bizarre realisation! Sadly, most textbooks aren’t teaching students how to speak ‘real-life’ Chinese, but focus on asking someone their zodiac or how to send a fax…

Additionally, no one actually speaks with slow, articulated pronunciation, especially your friendly taxi drivers from ‘Fubei’ (‘湖北人’ People from Hubei replace their ‘H’s with ‘F’s, which can be extremely confusing to the untrained ear)!

Luckily, Mandarin HQ has created video lessons for beginners to intermediate students to learn to listen and understand native Chinese speakers. You’ll not only hear native Chinese people speak with their own accents and dialects, but also in a variety of responses. After all, there’s more than one way to say where you are from!

WHAT IS MANDARIN HQ?

Mandarin HQ is a Chinese video lesson platform with a unique teaching method, that bridges the gap between textbook learning and real-life Chinese. There are lessons for beginners,
elementary and intermediate level learners, and once you’ve subscribed, you have access to ALL the videos.

Once you’ve selected your level, you can choose from any of the lessons in any order. Before you start, you’ll see the four ‘lesson steps’ to can take for each lesson, you can select of them, but it’s better to start from ‘Listen & Watch’ and work your way through the steps.

You’ll see the six question and six answers without any subtitles in the first step. It runs all the way through them, but you can repeat them or skip them by clicking the buttons at the bottom (Q1, Q2 etc).

The next step, ‘Listen & Read’ includes Pinyin and Chinese characters for each question and answer.

The final video step contains the Pinyin, Chinese and English translations for each video.

Once you get to the quiz section, you’ll watch the video for the last time without any subtitles, then scroll down to complete the quiz. Once you’re done, you can check the step as ‘complete’ and move onto your next lesson!

Here’s the Two White Chicks’ review of Mandarin HQ’s The Real Spoken Chinese Vault:

OUR FAVORITE MANDARIN HQ FEATURES

Unlike some other Chinese video lessons, your subscription unlocks EVERYTHING, FOREVER! You can select a video from any level, so if you’re an elementary learner, but need to review some beginner stuff, it’s as simple as clicking on the ‘Beginners’ video section. There are tons of videos for each level, so you go at your own pace, and switch around, and replay the videos as much as you want!

One of the things I really appreciate about the Mandarin HQ platform is how simple it is to navigate. It has a clean interface, that takes you directly to the video content. There’s no ‘oh, what do I do now?’ moment. You just select the level you want to study at and select a lesson. The platform directs you through the steps, so you can focus on the learning, instead of how to use the website. 

The steps for each video is extremely clear. The video is played several times with Pinyin, English and Chinese and you can pause the videos whenever you want to take down notes or review the sentence. 

The videos are very natural, so it’s easier to absorb the lesson. The fact that it’s not scripted and the sentences are spoken by ‘real’ people as opposed to actors, gives learners an opportunity to learn ‘filler’ words and also understand a bit more about how Chinese people articulate their words. The use of different dialects is probably one of my favorite features because I remember having SO many issues trying to understand people with thicker accents. I really wish Mandarin HQ had been around when I was struggling to understand why some people added 儿 to everything!

You can download the transcripts to follow along as you watch the video! The transcripts include Pinyin and English along with the Chinese characters, so you can review Chinese characters, as well as spoken Chinese. You can also download the audio files and listen to them offline, which is great. You can chuck them on your mobile and listen to them on the go!

Even though Mandarin HQ is super simple to use, you might still have a question about the examples in the video, and there’s a comment section underneath each video which is pretty active. All the questions that people have asked have been thoroughly answered by the lovely Angel Huang! 

The quiz at the end of each lesson is great and can be quite challenging coz there’s no English! You really have to focus on the video to get the answers right since there are sometimes only slight differences between the options.

WHAT COULD BE BETTER ABOUT MANDARIN HQ?

I really like the quiz feature and would love to see my progress for each quiz that I’ve completed so that I can go back and complete again if I need to. That way I can see what my score was and if I can beat it!

The Real Spoken Chinese Vault is pretty new, and although there are already 150 videos on the platform, I hope they keep adding even more. I’m excited to see more features in the future, but I hope they manage to keep their simple design.

PRICING AND PRICE COMPARISON TO OTHER PRODUCTS

Mandarin HQ is a one-time payment of $87 for unlimited access!

Here’s a comparison of some other online video courses:

DETAILS OF PRODUCT

Company: Mandarin HQ

Platform Type: Chinese video lessons

Free Trial: Can test out The Vault System here

Cost: $87.00 for unlimited access

Still not sure? Here’s more info about Mandarin HQ’s Real Spoken Chinese Vault:

Why not test drive Mandarin HQ’s Real Spoken Chinese Vault? Just scroll down to the ‘see how it works’ section)