Will the courses teach the PRC standard or the Taiwanese standard? Will the native speaker on the recording be male or female?

We'll be offering both PRC Mandarin and Taiwanese Mandarin options, so you can choose which standard you want to learn! Also, we'll be providing both male and female speakers for both standards. You can choose which one fits your needs best!

Can I go at my own pace? Will I still be able to access the courses once I've finished them?

Yes! Everything is available for you to go through at your own pace, and we have suggested study schedules too. You get lifetime access to the courses, so you can go back and review as many times as you want!

How much Chinese do I need to know to take this course?

None! If you are a total beginner, you’ll be learning new words, sentences, and phrases in addition to the grammar. If you have some experience with Mandarin, then you can focus more on the sentences themselves and on honing your pronunciation.

How long does the course take to complete?

Each lesson will take about an hour to listen to in its entirety, but you'll also need to spend a few hours doing your repetition drills for each lesson. Given 49 lessons and lots of repetition, expect to spend around 250 hours or more to get the full benefit of the course. That's about 9 months at an hour per day—a pretty solid pace!

How much time will it require per lesson?

It really depends on how much review you do. We highly recommend spending at least 20 min per day reviewing with the repetition drills and audio lessons. A little bit every day is much better than a lot once a week.

So, at a minimum, 20 min per day on old material, and 20 min per day on new material. Scheduling "review weeks" (where you just review, and don't learn any new material) is a good way to get caught up on reviewing. You should spend a minimum of 3-5 hours per week between new material and reviewing. Of course, a more aggressive review schedule could bring that up close to 10 hours per week, or even more. Of course, it depends on your goals and how much time you have available! We can help you figure out a good study/review schedule—just ask!

We'll also do regular live 45 minute Q&A sessions on Zoom, so you can pop in and ask questions if you'd like. There is also a discussion forum, so if you can't make it to the office hours, you can still get your questions answered. You can also watch the replays of the Q&A sessions.

Will I need anything (apps, etc.) in order to take the course?

No! Everything you need will be provided to you. You just need a device with internet access.

Here is a list of references I used for creating the course. However, I recommend NOT buying them until AFTER you’ve completed the course. And of course, you’re under no obligation to buy any of them—this is just if you want to dive in more deeply!

Li and Thompson, Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar
Claudia Ross, Ph.D., Schaum’s Outlines Chinese Grammar
A.G. Hawk, The Quick and Dirty Guide to Learning Languages Fast
Vivian Ling and Wang Peng, Essential Mandarin Chinese Grammar
Yip Po-Ching and Don Rimmington, Chinese an Essential Grammar
Yip Po-Ching and Don Rimmington, Intermediate Chinese: A Grammar and Workbook
Muhammad Wolfgang G. A. Schmidt, All the Grammar and Language Points for Each of the Six Levels of the Chinese Language Proficiency Test (HSK)
Richard Xiao, Paul Rayson, and Tony McEnery, A Frequency Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese

What time will the live Q&A sessions be?

We do the Q&A sessions at different times to try to accommodate people in different time zones as much as possible. You'll get notified in advance, and we usually offer two different time slots each time we do a Q&A session, so you can choose whichever one works best for you.

What does "lifetime access" mean?

In practical terms, it means the course materials will be available online for as long as Outlier is in business. If we do ever go out of business or otherwise need to remove the course for any reason, we'll make the material available for you to download for a period of at least 6 months.

Can I get a refund if I decide the course isn't for me?

Yes! We have a 30-day, no questions asked refund policy. If you decide you don't like the course for whatever reason, just reach out by then and I'll be happy to give you a full refund.

Will there be assignments or homework?

Assignments will be listening to the audio lessons, doing the repetition drills, and watching the grammar explanation videos. This is where the learning happens.

Can we collaborate with other students or form study groups?

Definitely! Our live courses usually have a few hundred students enrolled, so there should be plenty of students of all backgrounds and interests in this course too. Working together and coming up with better ways to study with other people is definitely a good thing. However, for your own learning, you have to do the legwork on your own!

We'll also have a private online community where you can work together, ask questions, share notes, etc.