Building Solidarity - One Word at a Time
Rules:
I took a great Chinese class back when there were Confucius Institutes in my area.
Then they shut them all down and, in a year, they were basically dead or dying (mostly dead a.k.a. gone from the scene).
It's... honestly kinda amazing what happened.
And nobody really talks about it, it seems.
I think about it a lot. as a naive, younger early career academic, the institute was my conceptual escape hatch. their offers for studying in mainland China were incredible and I thought, like a dumbass, "well if things really go teats up here with Bernie, I can make a play."
it was insane how rapidly they were severed from every R1 campus in favor of massive DoD grants and the institutional silence in the wake continues to fill me with dread.
My partner found one online by a Chinese university that he found to be pretty accessible. I'll try to remember to ask him for the link.* You can pester me in a pm if I forget.
*neurospicy disclaimer
Check out the italki app. You can get personalised lessons for a pretty good price there, and with someone who actually lives in China no less.
yeah I use italki practice + anki for flashcard vocab
I will definitely look into that!
The best thing you can do is hire a tutor to do private lessons with. Some can be quite affordable (exploitation alert ig, but I won't tell on you), but if it's a hobby you want to invest in, getting more expensive tutoring on a weekly basis is worth it. It keeps it fun since you can go at the exact pace you want, and structure the teaching to learn whatever is most fun/useful to you. There's no "class" to be bored in or to fall behind.
That's kind of along the lines of what I was thinking, but I don't know how to find a tutor. I'm not rich, I'm not used to, like, directly paying people to teach me stuff. Not only do I not know how to find them, I wouldn't know how to vet them either.
But I'd be willing to pay quite a bit, teaching is hard
What's nice about Italki is you can easily change it up. Might be best to start there with a few different people till you find someone you click with.
Also I've taken a lot of language tutoring online, and if you have a reasonable audio/video setup (I work from home so it was already there for me) you're good to go.
Could be good to start out with some guy in LA who learned your target language until you get conversational, and then switch to native speaking teacher(s) to build your skills from there.
I don't know any good online courses (I haven't looked so that doesn't mean there aren't any) so I'm gonna do the exact opposite of what you asked for and suggest the HelloChinese app as a backup option!
In terms of courses if I were looking for them I'd start with community colleges, including those that do online coursework.
HelloTalk.