If you're learning or planning to learn Chinese, you might be looking to learn Chinese for free, but that may not be a wise thing to do. Let me explain.

First of all, here is just a general question for you if you want to learn Chinese for free. How good are free things, usually? You know the answer… Not good at all. There are many possible reasons for a Chinese language course to be offered for free including a genuine intention to give away something highly valuable. However, most of the time, a Chinese lesson that is given away for free doesn't really measure up to the paid ones. That is why Chinese courses that claim to allow you to learn Chinese for free are usually not very valuable.

Also, another big problem with learning Chinese for free is that all those free Chinese learning materials often lack multimedia-based training materials. This might not be a big problem for other areas of learning, but it when comes to learning Chinese or learning Mandarin, you're missing a huge chunk of education if you don't hear it spoken or see natives interact with one another.

And most likely, you wouldn't receive the "whole package" if you were chasing after what would let you learn Chinese for free, because learning Chinese takes tons of effort and commitment, and the entire learning will definitely demand some form of investment.

With that being said, it is actually a neat idea to obtain some resources to learn Chinese for free when you're just beginning to learn the language so that you see a bigger picture of you learning Chinese, but I have yet to encounter someone who did learn Chinese from scratch until she achieves a reasonable proficiency level, all relying on free resources to learn Chinese.

The truth is, if you're committed to learning Chinese or learning Mandarin, you should take a serious Chinese language course and seek out some really good Chinese learning programs.

So next time when you feel like hunting for resources to learn Chinese for free, recall what you just read.