Where to get started

[boreal notch]

I want to learn Mandarin where should I start. my native language is English

[bright bear]

@boreal notch every pronunciations so u wont mess up the similar sounds

[fringe coral]

for reading and writing, learn the basic sentence structures, and by doing that you'll learn some basic words like I, you, she/he/they, and, ect

for listening and speaking yeah what they said

[silver girder]

It depends on your learning style and goals. I learn languages specifically to communicate with native speakers, so I lean heavily towards Comprehensible Input and trying to have simple chats with native speakers on Discord. For CI purposes I like Youtubers Lazy Chinese, Xiaogua Chinese, SyS Mandarin, ShuoShuo Chinese, Richard Chinese, Chinese with Ben, Jun - Stickynote Chinese, etc - but I would use anything that you like and that you can sort of follow (even if you require multiple viewings and/or subtitles) and pick up new vocabulary from. I try to avoid videos with English explanations and/or with AI-generated audio. I like Mandarin Bean and Todaii Chinese for reading simple texts.

[hushed pivot]

I am surprised you never mentioned Mandarin Blueprint. I learned Chinese pronunciation from his channel, sentence structures, and some words.

[silver girder]

I agree, they are awesome at the very beginning, but they speak in English the whole time and their videos are quite long, and I really try to learn more from videos that do everything in Mandarin, because I find it saves me a lot of time. I try to minimize explanations (unless they are done IN the target language) and maximize repetition, shadowing, CI, conversations ... - all in Mandarin as much as possible (even though i need subtitles).

[boreal notch]

Right now I have started learning pinyin and pronunciation

[modest nova]

說說中文 is also really good.