You Can Learn a Decent Amount of Mandarin in Three Months

I always assumed Mandarin was impossible to learn. Obviously not entirely impossible since people learn it. But I thought that a casual learner, without classes and by themselves, couldn’t really do much. This was only confirmed when I started looking at some Chinese introductory books. An introduction to Chinese characters just threw out some of the ones you’re likely to see, but the ones you are likely to see are compositions of multiple characters. So, remembering even the words for ‘airport’ (飞机场) and for ‘bus’ (公共汽车) would require learning seven characters. Extrapolating, it seemed impossible (by contrast, with hindsight I can see that these words are made out of characters that together describe the things they mean. Thus, ‘airport’ is something like ‘fly machine place’ and ‘bus’ something like ‘public car’ where the words for ‘public’ and ‘car’ can themselves be broken down.) <a href="https://mittmattmutt.medium.com/you-can-learn-a-decent-enough-amount-of-mandarin-in-three-months-a07cf2211787">Website</a>