It’s here: Mandarin Grammar Workbook, Vol. 1

If you’ve been trying to learn Mandarin for a while now, you probably know the feeling I’m about to describe. You sit down to study, you open your textbook or your app, and you go through the lesson, and on the page everything makes sense. You’ve seen this grammar pattern explained a dozen times, you understand it intellectually, you could probably even explain it back to someone if they asked. But then you try to actually say something or write something in Chinese, and suddenly you’re not sure whether to use 是 or 很, whether to say 不 or 没, whether the sentence you’re constructing even has the right word order, and the confidence you had thirty seconds ago has completely evaporated.

That feeling, that gap between recognizing Mandarin when you see it and being able to produce Mandarin when you need to, is the single biggest problem I see in almost every beginner who writes to me. You’ve done some Duolingo, you’ve taken a class or two, maybe you’ve worked through a textbook or two, and you’ve read explanations about how Chinese grammar works. But reading about grammar and using grammar are two completely different skills, and most of what’s out there for beginners is heavy on the reading and very light on the actual using.

This is the real reason so many learners feel stuck at the beginner stage. It’s not that you don’t understand the grammar. It’s that you’ve never had the chance to practice it enough times, in enough different ways, with enough feedback, for it to become second nature. And without that practice, every new sentence you try to produce feels like starting from scratch.

For the past five months, while I’ve been here in Beijing teaching mathematics at Beihang university and writing the weekly Chinese Grammar Gems lessons, I’ve also been working on something else on the side. Something specifically designed to close that gap for beginners, because all my paid content so far has been for intermediate learners, and I’ve known for a long time that I wasn’t serving the people who need the most help. Today, it’s finally ready.

Mandarin Grammar Workbook, Volume 1: Building Blocks.

The character on the cover is 壹 (yī), the formal way to write “one” in Chinese. You’ll see it on banknotes, contracts, and official documents, anywhere the regular 一 would be too easy to alter by adding a single stroke. It sits inside the 田 grid that Chinese kids use to learn how characters are balanced. A small first lesson, hidden in plain sight on the cover.

It’s a 174-page workbook built around one simple idea: you don’t need more grammar explanations, you need more grammar practice. The lessons inside are intentionally short and to the point, usually a page or two each, just enough to remind you of the pattern and show you a few clear examples. And then immediately, you get to work. Six different kinds of exercises per chapter, 108 exercises in total, all of them designed to take the grammar off the page and put it into your own sentences.

The book stays especially close to the words and patterns that trip everyone up at the beginner level. When do you say 是 and when do you say 很? What’s the real difference between 不 and 没? Between 在 and 是 when you’re talking about where something is? Between 二 and 两 when you’re counting? And then there’s 了, that one tiny character that single-handedly confuses just about every beginner I’ve ever met, because it can mark a completed action, or a change of state, or sometimes both at once, and most textbooks don’t give you nearly enough practice to feel the difference. These are the questions that tripped me up the most when I was learning, and they’re the ones that most textbooks introduce side by side, give you one quick example each, and then move on from.

The problem with that approach is that you end up “knowing” both options without ever really feeling the difference, and so when it’s time to produce a sentence on your own, you guess. Sometimes you guess right, sometimes you guess wrong, and either way, you don’t build the intuition that lets you do this without thinking.

My workbook does the opposite. It stays with these pairs and contrasts, and it forces you to practice them, over and over, in the kind of varied exercises that gradually build real intuition instead of just helping you pass a quiz.

Why I built it around the new HSK 1.

The HSK standard is changing in July 2026. The new HSK 1 covers significantly more ground than the old one did, and most existing beginner materials haven’t caught up yet. I wanted to give you a workbook that’s actually built around the new standard from the ground up, not retrofitted from older content, so that whatever you learn here is exactly aligned with where the language is headed.

The exercises cover essentially all of the new HSK 1 vocabulary, plus a good number of HSK 2 and HSK 3 words. And because I’ve been living in Beijing for the past months while writing this, I made sure to include the words and expressions that people here actually use day to day, not the textbook versions that nobody says out loud anymore.

What you’ll find inside.

Eighteen chapters covering greetings, sentence structure, asking and answering questions, numbers and measure words, time and dates, the 不 versus 没 negation, the 了 particle, modal verbs like 想 and 要, the three different ways to say “can” in Mandarin, and a lot more. Each chapter opens with a short, focused introduction that walks you through the grammar with real examples, and then gives you six different kinds of exercises to actually practice what you’ve just learned. There’s pattern choice, where you read a situation and pick the sentence that fits. There’s error correction, where the sentence looks fine but one word is wrong. There’s dialogue completion, translation, comparison (which is honestly the heart of the workbook), and sentence ordering. Every chapter ends with a full answer key and detailed explanations, because checking your work is often where the real learning happens.

There’s also a companion Anki deck.

While I was building the workbook, I realized that the example sentences and exercise answers would make an incredible review deck if I packaged them properly. So I did. The deck has 534 cards drawn directly from the book, not isolated vocabulary words but full sentences in context, with grammar explanations on the back. Everything is tagged by chapter and by grammar topic, so you can filter your review to exactly what you’re working on this week. Practice in the book, then practice again in Anki, until the patterns stop feeling like grammar rules and start feeling like the way Mandarin just works.

Launch week pricing.

I’m offering the workbook and the Anki deck together for €29 instead of €49 until Sunday May 24, 23:59 Pacific Time. After Sunday night, the price returns to €49.

7-day money-back guarantee.

If you buy the workbook and it isn’t what you were expecting, you can email me at nihao@hsklevel.com within 7 days of your purchase and I’ll send you a full refund. No questions asked, no friction.

Get the workbook + Anki deck for €29

Practice Makes Perfect,
Pierre