Free C1 Chinese course: advanced

C1 is fluent, flexible Chinese: the classical function words of written Chinese, discourse markers, hedging, irony, chengyu with their stories, formal letters, colloquial speech and regional variation.

8 grammar lessons, 2 graded stories, 3 classic books, 4 videos, flashcards and an AI conversation partner, all free. C1 is roughly HSK 6 and above; the two scales measure different things, so treat it as a guide.

What you'll be able to do

• Listening: I can understand extended speech and films without much effort, including speakers with regional accents (about HSK 6 and above).
• Reading: I can read long, complex texts, including specialised articles, and recognise common chengyu (four-character idioms) and written styles.
• Speaking: I can express myself fluently and spontaneously, adjusting my register for friends, colleagues and formal occasions.
• Speaking: I can use Mandarin flexibly and effectively in meetings, negotiations and presentations.
• Writing: I can write well-structured formal emails, reports and essays that read naturally to a Chinese reader.

What you'll learn

Learning C1 Chinese with AI

At C1 the AI uses fully natural Mandarin with shifts of register, chengyu where they fit and slang where it's appropriate: practise a formal email, then a casual chat. The AI also explains any wrong answer in a lesson, in plain English. It's included free, with a daily allowance; like any AI it can make mistakes, so the lessons remain the reference. More about learning Chinese with AI.

All 8 C1 grammar lessons

Free to read here. In the app, each one is taught in short steps with audio, practised, and brought back for review.

1. Written register: 之, 其, 此, 乃, 亦, 均, 于, 以
2. Discourse markers: 总之, 换句话说, 况且, 何况, 反之
3. Hedging: 似乎, 未必, 不见得, 恐怕, 难免, 不至于, 想必
4. Rhetorical questions and irony: 难道, 哪儿, 还…呢, 什么…不…的
5. Chengyu and their stories: 画蛇添足, 守株待兔, 塞翁失马, 对牛弹琴
6. Formal letters and notices: 贵, 敬请, 鉴于, 特此, 此致敬礼, 予以
7. Colloquial speech: 歇后语, slang and internet words
8. Varieties of Chinese: mainland, Taiwan, accents and Cantonese loans

Words for C1

HSK 6 vocabulary list, with pinyin and examples (C1): 807 words with pinyin, English and an example sentence.

Reading at C1

• 回家的路: Feature on a tradition: the Spring Festival travel rush (春运), how it has changed from overnight queues to ticket apps and 'reverse' journeys, and what has not changed.
• 楼上的琴声: Short story with a twist: every night at ten, someone upstairs plays the same tune badly. The narrator complains, then starts to listen, and finally knocks on the door.
• 朝花夕拾（八篇） by Lu Xun 鲁迅 (1928): Eight of the ten memoirs of Lu Xun's childhood and youth (this edition lacks “From Hundred-Grass Garden to Three-Flavour Study” and “Father’s Illness”): his nurse Ah Chang, the old village festivals, his Japanese teacher Mr Fujino. His most approachable prose.
• 呐喊 by Lu Xun 鲁迅 (1923): Lu Xun's first collection of stories, which began modern Chinese fiction: A Madman's Diary, Kong Yiji, My Old Home and The True Story of Ah Q.
• 彷徨（八篇） by Lu Xun 鲁迅 (1926): Eight of the eleven stories of Lu Xun's second collection, including The New Year's Sacrifice, In the Wine Shop and Regret for the Past (the edition lacks the other three).

Listening at C1

• Chemistry and science videos (一席YiXi): Yang Fan, the Bilibili creator 'Zhen Fengwu Jiutian' who got full marks in chemistry and went on to the Beijing Film Academy, tells how a teenage love of chemistry became his 'Crazy Chemistry' videos. He walks through experiments such as the 'bleeding heart', the sodium jump, the oscillating iodine clock and a rainbow of iodine smoke.
• Art and ageing (一条Yit): A Beijing painter looks back on forty years of painting. She talks about her body and ageing, the father who took her sketching, the freedom of art school and bold colours in her youth, and the wildflowers and bees near her studio. She also talks about her long partnership with a fellow painter and coming to terms with death.
• Evolution and fossils (一席YiXi): Palaeontologist Zhu Min traces how fish became land animals over 500 million years. He covers jawless fish and the origin of the jaw, and armoured placoderms that did not fully die out. Fossils from Zhejiang and from Qujing in Yunnan put China at the root of the lobe-finned fishes. Finally he explains how nostrils, limbs and necks evolved for life on land.
• Artificial intelligence (一席YiXi): Wu Yi, a former OpenAI researcher now at Tsinghua, explains AI's problems from the inside. He covers adversarial examples, bias and over-confidence, and why models learn correlation rather than causation and so hallucinate. He shows how reinforcement learning can teach a model to say 'I don't know', and explains the alignment problem.

Questions