What is Pimsleur Mandarin?
Pimsleur is built on Paul Pimsleur’s method from the 1960s: you hear a phrase, are prompted to say it, and then hear it again at increasing intervals. The Mandarin course has five levels of 30 lessons, each about half an hour.
The app adds reading lessons, flashcards, quick-match games and an AI Voice Coach. Pinyin is taught in the reading lessons for the first four levels; characters only appear in Level 5.
What Pimsleur does well
For a tonal language like Mandarin, constant listening and repeating after native speakers is valuable. Pimsleur makes you produce sentences out loud, which builds confidence that many app learners never get.
It is also easy to fit into life: you can do a lesson in the car or on a walk without looking at a screen.
Where Pimsleur falls short
The vocabulary is small and the course does not follow HSK, so it will not prepare you for an exam or for reading. Characters arrive very late, and grammar is learned only implicitly.
The subscription is relatively expensive, and many learners find the format repetitive once the novelty wears off.
How MandarinChineseSystem.com compares
MandarinChineseSystem.com covers exactly what Pimsleur skips: more than 5,600 HSK words with characters, pinyin and meaning, character pages with stroke order and writing practice, and 240 graded reading and listening articles from HSK 1 to HSK 6 with literal translations.
It is not a spoken course, and its audio is computer-generated rather than recorded by native speakers. That is why we recommend Pimsleur for the speaking side if speaking is your priority.
The verdict: which should you choose?
Pimsleur for your ears and mouth, MandarinChineseSystem.com for your eyes and memory. If you can only pick one and you want to read Chinese, start with MandarinChineseSystem.com — it is free.