I have been doing Duolingo exercises for a few days now, but some good books, videos, apps or websites would help me out. My tone pronunciation is a complete mess.
Check out Coursera, solid essential Mandarin course for free spanning several weeks that was good on tone work.
The Leader(Karl Marx cartoon) is on youtube w/ english captions
Hello Chinese is a freemium app I’ve used extensively. I’m supposedly up to hsk1 and I’ve enjoyed it a lot and have learned a lot. It will still take me a long time, but I feel like it’s given me a foothold in pronunciation, vocab, hanzi, and that Im way more curious and excited to learn more. Would recommend.
Also pleco for an extensive dictionary/hanzi reference.
I second both of these. Hello Chinese is excellent, and while the thread question asks for free/cheap, I can’t recommend premium enough. The podcasts are excellent, and the recently added character practice has helped me tremendously.
Pleco should be considered a baseline learning tool.
Technically not free, but the Confucius Institute uses the 7-volume “New Practical Chinese Reader” textbooks that are as free as books can get on libgen.
