Your first week

The first week decides whether there is a second one, and the thing that goes wrong is almost never difficulty — it is trying to do everything at once and then doing none of it. This is the shape we would suggest: one orientation day, then a small routine you can actually keep.

Day one: Orientation Day

Your study plan puts a single Orientation Day at the front, before the HSK path begins. It is a handful of short guided walkthroughs — twenty minutes or so in total — each opening one surface and showing you what it does.

It is worth doing properly rather than skipping. Most of what people later email about is a feature they never found, and this is the day that introduces them.

Days two to seven

From here your plan takes over and tells you what is next. If you would rather have a shape in your head than follow it blindly, this is the one that works:

1. Do the lesson your plan names — One lesson, not three. A lesson is dialogue, vocabulary, grammar and practice, and finishing one properly beats skimming several.
2. Review your flashcards first, every time — Before the new lesson, not after. Review is the part that decays if you postpone it, and it is short — five minutes on most days.
3. Read the day’s [Dragon Daily](/dragon-daily) — Two minutes. It is the habit anchor: something small and finishable on the days you have no appetite for a lesson.
4. Say one thing out loud — A sentence from the dialogue is enough. Reading aloud recruits your ear and your mouth at once, and it is the step people skip first.
5. Stop when the plan says stop — The schedule is built from the minutes you said you had. Overrunning on Monday is how Thursday gets skipped.

The three habits that decide it

• Same time, every day — Fifteen minutes at a fixed hour beats an hour whenever you remember. The consistency is doing more work than the duration.
• Never skip two in a row — One missed day is nothing — the schedule reshuffles around you and nothing is lost. Two is where a habit stops being a habit.
• Finish things — A completed lesson at a level slightly too easy is worth more than half of a hard one. Momentum is the resource you are short of in week one, not challenge.

What to ignore for now

The site is large, and in week one most of it is a distraction. The four skill studios, the specialised modules, the Learning Lab and the culture library are all worth your time later and none of them in the first week.

Two exceptions, because they cost nothing and pay immediately: tap any Chinese character anywhere on the site for its meaning and pronunciation, and use the dictionary whenever a word will not stick.