你好！

HelloTalk is a great app to meet language partners and native speaker friends, it’s monetized to hell though, so the best thing to do is meet people there, build a rapport, and get yourself someone willing to approve you for WeChat and talk to people there. Having a bunch of native speakers I talk to all the time has really helped me with my Chinese, and they’re all so kind and cool. Plus, they can teach you more native sounding language than you can learn from formal training, and slang. I’ve made multiple really good friends, and dozens of acquaintances. There’s even actual Chinese teachers on there, but I mostly just chat with people and we correct each other when we can.

Focus less on tones at first, and more on just internalizing the structures and characters. I have a notebook I use along with DuoLingo. Anytime it shows me a new character I write it down. I also write down most of the sentences of teaches me, and try to use those with my native language partners so they can correct me on it if needed. I’m up to 40 pages of notes so far, but it’s less overwhelming than I thought it would be. Writing really helps me hear the characters in my head when I see them later. If you do voice chat with native speakers, they can help you with your tones way better than duolingo’s tone training, so it’s better to just start talking to people as soon as you can I feel like.