🇨🇳 中文
Practice speaking Mandarin
Mandarin has no conjugation and no cases, and is still hard to speak — because the difficulty sits in the sounds rather than the grammar.
How you practice Mandarin on Tokmia
Tokmia runs lives — group voice conversations you can drop into. Every live has a stage and an audience, and you arrive in the audience. You can stay there and just listen for as long as you want; when you are ready, you raise your hand and the host brings you up. A live holds up to eight speakers, so the people who come up actually get a turn.
If a group feels like too much, Practice Now pairs you one-to-one with somebody learning your language while you learn theirs, on a fixed timer with a shared prompt on screen — eight minutes of free conversation, or seven minutes of vocabulary or role play. Neither of you has to invent the first sentence.
Mandarin is one of the twelve languages on Tokmia with the learning side fully built out, so words you look up during a conversation and grammar mistakes pulled from the session afterwards go into spaced-repetition decks you can review the next day.
What is actually hard about speaking Mandarin
Not the same as what is hard about reading it. These are the things that show up specifically when you have to produce the language in real time:
Tones shift in connected speech
Tones learned in isolation change when words combine: two third tones in a row and the first becomes a second tone. Learners drill single syllables perfectly and are still misunderstood in sentences, because sentences are where the rules actually apply.
Measure words are unavoidable
You cannot say three books without 本. The measure word depends on the noun, and the pairing has to be automatic rather than reasoned.
No tenses, but aspect matters
了, 过 and 着 mark completion and experience rather than time. Speakers of tense-based languages tend to over-apply 了 early on, and correction in conversation fixes it faster than explanation.
What a Mandarin live looks like
Hosts name their own lives and set the level, so you can tell before joining whether it is meant for you. Titles look like:
- 用中文聊天 — 什么话题都可以
- 初级中文 · 慢速练习
- 面试练习（中文）
Examples of how hosts title lives, not a listing of what is running right now.
Before you start
- Listening counts. Sitting in the audience is a legitimate way to use Tokmia and a lot of people do it for their first week.
- Nobody can message you unless you follow each other back. There is no setting that opens your inbox to strangers — see Safety.
- Nothing is recorded. Voice conversations are never recorded, by us or for us.
- It is free. Joining and hosting lives and the review decks cost nothing, with no minute limit and no ads.
Free when it launches. Other languages