Other kinds of Chinese are also probably rad but this is the kind I'm learnin

mandarin is really cool, i wanted to study it in school but i had to drop the class bc too many hours, which i still regret. maybe someday

hear this from lots of ppl, want to look into it eventually, thats rad youre learning it

Nota bene (and I'm not necessarily directing this at you, 1vs): the writing system - as you allude with 'simplified' - isn't a language, it's a writing system. It's entirely possible to write Chinese in a latin alphabet using pinyin, like:

Wǒ shì Měiguó quánměi diànshì[tái] zhíxíng tái zhǎng Zhāng Huìjūn. Wǒ de wèntí shì: yǐ guǎn zīběn wéi zhǔ zhuǎnbiàn, guózī jiānguǎn zhínéng shì dāngxià dàjiā dōu pǔbiàn guānzhù de yīgè huàtí.

And so on. Here's (1, 2) Victor Mair, a world renown sinologist, on the topic of learning to read Chinese. TL;DR: delay learning the characters in lieu for spoken language and reading pinyin (or pinyin annotated) texts.

I use the flashcard program Anki for a bunch of stuff and answer questions from time to time on /r/Anki and many Japanese and Chinese learners there make this grave mistake of trying to memorize like 10 characters a day from the beginning and I basically all the time have to tell them this biz since wasting so much time would be tragic, so it was on my mind.

I sit down for 20 minutes a day and do it! I've picked up a streak on a number of learning apps (I don't like to use just one) if you want recommendations!

Oo good post! I've been focusing more on speaking and listening comprehension so it's good to know I'm on the right track there.

Do you speak / are you learning Chinese?

im definitely interested in anything you have found that works well. i'd love to try it

I started with the Hello Chinese. I started using Memrise (flash cards), Duolingo, and LingoDeer as well. Getting streak on them takes about 20 min a day every day.

They all seem to have different ideas about where to start with learning, so I feel like it's balanced to use several different apps, if that makes sense?

Yeah it's a solid choice, however, you could try finding texts in pīnyīn for reading practice. Reading has benefits and you can circumvent the usual scripts for the most part with tech. Functional literacy needs thousands of words in your vocabulary anyways and you can start grokking the characters later.

I actually neither speak nor am I learning Chinese, I've just had some casual interest into CJK scripts. I've read Chinese philosophy and literature in translation where some passing knowledge of the script is useful. But honestly after seeing this thread... Maybe I should start it too. I've got my previous hobby languages, French and Swedish up to the point I can read them just fine and I don't have atm access to speech practice without, like, effort.

I just have a few resources in my mind that you might not be aware of that I've found useful for language learning:

1. Paul Nation's What Do You Need to Know to Learn a Foreign Language?. It's only 56 pages of lucid prose and by far the best source for solid strategies for learning. Nation is apparently one of the biggest names in second language vocabulary acquisition.
2. Nation also offers survival vocabulary lists. These are 120 words and phrases that are the most important ones for a person going on a brief visit. Here's the one for Mandarin. This is the original paper that outlines the methodology for how it was constructed and tips for usage.
3. Some of the very best public domain foreign language courses are those by Foreign Service Institute, who train US diplomats etc. The Mandarin one is probably good if somewhat outdated. There are tons of hobby pages dedicated just to hosting these courses.
4. I'm big into Anki the spaced repetition flash card software. I've got 10,000 cards atm. Flash cards are like outrageously good for vocabulary.
5. Learning With Texts is a quirky yet cool tool for reading practice. You copy paste a foreign language texts, you can add dictionaries to translate each word by clicking them, you can collect words and make flash cards out of the sentences. It shows which words you haven't encountered yet and so on.