For any one learning Mandarin, the best advice I have is: don't start with reading, start with speaking. The Michel Thomas method has worked pretty well, much

For any one learning Mandarin, the best advice I have is: don't start with reading, start with speaking. The Michel Thomas method has worked pretty well, much better than Pimsleur, for me: https://www.michelthomas.com/ https://www.michelthomas.com/ And the Yale "Speak Mandarin" series with romanized Chinese is also really helpful. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300000849/speak-mandarin-textbook https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300000849/speak-mandarin... Learning Mandarin, overall, carries a much higher cognitive load than, say, Spanish, because the sounds don't map to 26 letters. They map to 1000s of characters that must be memorized. This makes reading a much less useful way for a beginner to approach a language.