Yoyo Chinese

What Yoyo Chinese is

Yoyo Chinese is an online Mandarin Chinese course for English-speaking learners, built around pre-recorded video lessons with practice and quiz tools attached to each one. It is a learner product: you sign up, follow a structured curriculum and study on your own schedule. The homepage promises that learners can learn conversational Chinese in 6 months or less, and it counts 1000+ lesson videos, 500K+ students, 2M+ lessons learned and 20M+ YouTube views. The company is Yoyo Chinese Inc., and its copyright line runs from 2012.

The teaching has one face. The FAQ says there are no live video lessons; instead, "Yangyang will become your teacher" across the 1,000+ pre-recorded lessons, and a learner can re-watch, practice, review or ask a question about any lesson at any time. The company says it helps students find tutors it trusts when they ask, but live classes are not part of the product. It also makes a point of how the course is built: "We don't rely on AI-generated dialogue," the homepage says, describing more than 10 years spent designing the program around the problems Chinese learners commonly face.

The curriculum

The homepage describes 1,000+ lessons in 6+ comprehensive courses, enough to take a learner "from true newbie to speaking and reading Chinese all in one place." The course planner names them in order: Beginner, Character I, Intermediate, Character II, Upper Intermediate and Character Reader, so spoken Chinese and reading characters advance side by side. A guided study schedule tells the learner what to do next, and the planner lets them choose a pace of 30 minutes a day over 1, 6, 12 or 24 months.

Every lesson follows the same three steps. In Watch, the learner sees a video that is "only about 5 minutes long." In Practice, they review the material with flashcards, dialogues, listening and speaking exercises and lecture notes. Each lesson then ends with a ten question interactive quiz. Around the core courses sit a Chinese Grammar Series, a How To Say series, downloadable resources and what the site calls Smart Mastery Tools for review.

The FAQ answers the questions a serious learner asks early. The character courses use simplified characters in the videos, but the flashcards, quiz questions (minus the images) and other features can be switched to traditional, and the FAQ notes that 70% of the 600 characters in its Character Course are the same in both scripts. The course was not built for the HSK exam, but the FAQ says its material overlaps with HSK preparation. The dialogues use real-life recordings of native Chinese speakers from the start, with detailed breakdowns and slow-speed audio.

On results, the FAQ says that in less than 30 days a learner can pronounce every sound in Chinese with its tones, introduce themselves, count to ten and greet people, and that on the recommended schedule of 30 minutes a day they can speak basic conversational Chinese in 6 months or less. The homepage goes further and says that with as little as 30 minutes a day, "we guarantee you'll see real progress."

Free pronunciation tools

Several of the pronunciation tools are free. The Interactive Pinyin Chart has audio demonstrations and video explanations for every possible sound combination in Mandarin. The page explains that once you master its 409 sounds along with the tones, you have practically mastered the pronunciation of every word, and that an English speaker already knows how to pronounce over half of them. It also warns that about 50% of the time a pinyin syllable is not pronounced the way it would be in English. Video lessons linked from the chart let learners record themselves and listen back to compare with the examples.

The Tone Pairs tool trains the five tones in combination, because, as the page argues, Mandarin speech often breaks into two-character pieces and individually practiced tones get jumbled in real sentences. The tool is a 4x5 chart in which each cell is a tone pair with a common word in pinyin and characters, an English translation and a native speaker recording; a "Refresh for more" button cycles through hundreds of words. The Downloads page adds dozens of free study materials, from PDF cheat sheets and MP3 audio exercises to ebooks and infographics, such as 20 essential tone pair tables, a guide to the three "de" particles, a list of essential measure words and the top 10 common mistakes English speakers make.

Plans and terms

The pricing page lists four plans. Free gives full access to the Interactive Pinyin Chart, 75+ free video lessons, 750+ free quiz questions and the free downloads; the FAQ describes it as full Yoyo Learn access to roughly the first 30 lessons. Watch gives access to all 1,000+ video lessons with downloadable notes, but not the Practice, Quiz and Mastery features, and the FAQ pitches it at learners who already have their own study routine. Learn is the full product and the one the company recommends for new students: the full 6-course curriculum, 1,000+ videos, 10,000+ handwritten quiz questions, 15,000 dual-audio flashcards, 5,000+ native speaker dialogue recordings and 472 minutes of Audio Review practice. Lifetime Learner is a one-time payment for lifetime access to everything in Learn, which the FAQ defines as the lifetime of Yoyo Chinese as a business.

Watch and Learn are monthly or annual subscriptions, with a 40% discount on annual billing, and they renew automatically until canceled. A learner can cancel at any time without further charges, and the company keeps the learning history so they can pick up again later. Lesson videos stream only and cannot be downloaded. Purchases made directly on the website carry a 7-day money-back guarantee on the initial purchase, with no refunds for renewals; App Store purchases are refunded through Apple. Subscribers and lifetime members get day-one access to new lessons, including an upcoming Advanced Conversational Chinese course.

Who it suits

Yoyo Chinese suits self-directed adults, especially English speakers, who want a clear path through Mandarin from the first sounds to reading characters, taught by one consistent teacher in short videos. The free tier is generous enough to judge the teaching style before paying, and the Watch plan fits learners who already use a textbook or a class and want the videos as a supplement. Learners who want live conversation practice will need a tutor alongside it, which the company says it can help them find.