The best Twitter feeds for learning Chinese in 2015

Learning Chinese can feel overwhelming, especially when you’re faced with the infamous Great Wall of Chinese (text). One way of making it easier is to chop it up into many bite-sized pieces.

This makes Twitter an excellent place to learn a bit of Chinese without drowning. Each message is limited to 140 characters, so it can’t be that hard, can it? There’s an increasing number of people on Twitter who try to use these short messages to help you learn Chinese.

In this article, I’m going to share with you my favourite Twitter feeds for Chinese content. I have used the following criteria to create this list. The feeds have to:

• Be suitable for language learners – This means including translations, Pinyin or both. I have avoided including too many Chinese-only feeds and focused on those that are suitable for beginners and intermediate learners. Advanced learners will of course benefit too.
• Contain mostly Chinese language content – Some feeds contain a lot of interesting language content, but mixed up with too many other things. I have only included those that almost exclusively focus on Chinese language content.
• Not rely on links to be useful – Twitter is often used to share links to interesting content. For this article, I have focused on content that is meaningful and useful directly on Twitter, i.e. without having to go to an external site.

There is of course more to learning Chinese on Twitter than just language content. A few years ago, I wrote an article called 31 Twitter feeds to help you learn Chinese. That article is mostly obsolete now, too many users have gone inactive and many new have arrived on the scene.

In that article, I included people who tweeted about language learning and studying Chinese. If you want more of that, the easiest way is to follow me on Twitter, because I share most of the interesting stuff I stumble upon. You can also follow my other list on Twitter, which is more about learning Chinese in general.

The 9 best Twitter feeds for learning Chinese

These are my favourites. If you want to recommend an account that follows the above criteria, but isn’t mentioned in this article, please contact me and I’ll add that account to my watch list. Please don’t suggest accounts that only post single words unless these are terribly interesting.

If you want to view all the accounts below on Twitter, click here to view my Chinese content list on Twitter!

LearnchineseCSL @learnchineseCSL

Focus: Unusual sentences with matching and fun pictures. Pinyin + translation. Simplified.
Comment: Great sentence source, doesn’t clutter tweets with other things.
Sample tweet:

Hello HSK_EN @HS201202

Focus: Useful sentences with matching pictures. Pinyin + translation. Simplified.
Comment: Great content. Short and to the point, easy to use elsewhere.
Sample tweet:

Liz Carter @withoutdoing

Focus: Interesting expressions, slang or idioms. Pinyin + translation. Occasional cats.
Comment: By far the most interesting content on this list.
Sample tweets:

All about Chinese @allaboutchinese

Focus: Inspirational quotes. No Pinyin. Simplified.
Comment: Good sentences, sometimes a bit sentimental. Source seldom given.
Sample tweet:

Learn Mandarin 中文故事 @ZhongWenGuShi

Focus: Useful sentences with interesting and matching pictures. Pinyin + translation. Traditional/simplified.
Comment: Tweets only pictures, so much harder to copy. Carefully matched content, though.
Sample tweet:

LearnChineseWords @VocabChinese

Focus: Useful sentences with pinyin and translation. Simplified.
Comment: Great content. Short and to the point, easy to use elsewhere.
Sample tweet:

Chinese Proverbs @ChinaProverbs

Focus:  Interesting Chinese proverbs with translation. No Pinyin. Simplified.
Comment:  Doesn’t tweet often, but content is good, at least the proverb posts.
Sample tweets:

Chinese Language @learnchinesehl

Focus: Basic, useful sentences with Pinyin and translation. Simplified.
Comment:  Words plus example sentence. A bit bland, but very useful.
Sample tweets:

Speak Up Chinese @speakupchinese

Focus: Individual words with pictures. Pinyin + translation. Some language-learning related links. Simplified
Comment: Interesting word choice (intermediate and above) with helpful pictures.
Sample tweet:

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That’s it for now! Have I missed anything? What’s your favourite Twitter feeds for learning Chinese?

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