Mandarin is spoken by about 1,182 million people.
On our measured language map, its closest relatives are Cantonese, Urdu and Taiwanese Hokkien. If you speak one of those, much of the vocabulary will feel familiar from day one.
Structurally, objects usually come before their verbs; it is written in the Han script, and the course teaches the writing system letter by letter with pronunciation shown while you learn.
Every lesson is built from 2,000 real Mandarin sentences, aligned with their translations word by word and piece by piece, so you always see how the sentence actually works instead of memorizing flashcards. The grammar is discovered from the sentences themselves, 1,392 patterns so far, and a spaced-repetition quiz teaches it in the order that unlocks the most of the language first. Our measured estimate for reaching conversational level from English is about 2,124 hours of study. Read how it works.
Most apps only teach Mandarin through English, if they teach it at all. These starting languages already have a built course, and any other published language can be paired on request:
Speaker figures follow Ethnologue and national censuses, rounded; the difficulty estimate is calibrated against U.S. Foreign Service Institute data.