11/6/2025
When it comes to learning Chinese, a prejudice persists: you would have to master thousands of characters to start communicating. This myth, which makes Chinese an inaccessible language, greatly discourages those who would like to get started. This is indeed a myth, because it is entirely possible to speak Chinese well with a minimum of characters. We tell you why, and especially how!
Chinese is a logographic language, which means it doesn't have an alphabet like French or English. Instead, it is composed of Chinese characters (or sinograms), each representing a specific idea or word. This particularity is often perceived as an insurmountable complexity, but it is in fact an easy way to learn Chinese.
Although there are tens of thousands of Chinese characters (experts say over 40,000!) , most of them have become archaic and are no longer used.
To have a conversation in Chinese or read a newspaper, you only need a fraction of these characters...
First good news!
Learning 500 characters is enough for you to understand 70% of a Chinese text.
Second good news!
With MandarinMaster and its step-by-step method, you only need one year to get there.
Third good news!
If you prove to your Chinese interlocutors that you have made the effort to learn their language, they will admire and encourage you to continue. You will then enter into a unique complicity with them, which will give way to lightness and humor.
Knowing 500 characters is not just recognizing them visually : what is of course necessary to understand a written text. Above all, it's about pronouncing them WELL.
PINYIN, the official phonetics, is there to help us by also telling us which tone should be used.
In the MandarinMaster method, we want to give priority to oral practice. We have developed an innovative technology that allows the automatic validation of your pronunciation. Every day that the method does, when you learn the 2 or 3 characters of the day and the 10 vocabulary words, you need to practice pronouncing them well. Because it is at the very moment when you learn the character that you have to assimilate its pronunciation well.
MandarinMaster first teaches you the most used characters based on the vocabulary required to take the HSK tests. To make it easier to remember these characters, you will learn to write them, pronounce them, recognize them visually, use them in new words, and place them in simple sentences.
Our FLASHCARDS make your learning even more fun, by giving you a summary vision of everything you have seen and by encouraging you to keep it in memory with very simple color codes.
Without talking to you about weekly reviews And monthly revisions that are offered to you.
In fact, with MandarinMaster, you are supported day by day. You no longer have to ask yourself the question: what should I learn today?
In your MandarinMaster Personal Space, you will find every day:
- your lesson (a 3-minute video that introduces the 2 to 3 characters of the day)
- your writing exercise (kinesthetic memory)
- and your online training (the equivalent of your personal work after a class)
In short, 25 minutes a day of Chinese and you can move on without fear!
You will no longer need to say to yourself: “I have to work my Chinese!”
Chinese is a fascinating language that deserves to be demystified. It is possible to speak Chinese well without knowing a large number of characters. By focusing on the most used characters and progressing step by step, learning the language becomes much more accessible.
This is exactly what the MandarinMaster method allows you, specially designed and developed by a Franco-Chinese team for French learners.
Do you want to have proof of that? Come and take advantage of the 14-day free trial!