Migaku, a Discord server for people who want to learn Chinese (Mandarin or Cantonese)
Last updated: January 30, 2025
Hi! If you're a Discord veteran, then I'll cut to the chase:
Otherwise, if this is a new platform for you, then we'll take a moment to chat about:
- How to join Discord / what is Discord?
- Why you should totally join Migaku's Chinese Discord server
- 1. You'll connect with like 10,000 people who want to learn Mandarin (and Cantonese, and other languages)
- 2. We've got six perpetual conversations about Chinese learning going on
- 3. You can get honest takes about how to learn Chinese with Migaku (and other apps)
- 4. You can find accountability buddies, share pictures of your lunch, and stuff like that
- 5. ... and more
How to join Discord / what is Discord?
On the off chance that you've never hard of Discord before, it looks like this:
It's kind of like a Reddit server or a big chat room where people who are interested in learning languages come to talk about... well... language learning!
Sign up for Discord and join Migaku's language learning server
- Create a Discord Account: Sign up for a Discord account if you don't already have one—you'll probably want to download their app, too (iOS/Android)
- Join the Migaku Discord Server: Click here (or that big orange button up at the start of the blog post) to receive an invitation to our server
- Set your roles: Before you can join the conversation, you'll be asked to provide some basic information about what you're interested in so that we can put you into the appropriate Chinese Language channels. (In the event of chaos, you can manually set your roles here)
- Introduce Yourself: While optional, we highly recommend that you introduce yourself to other Chinese learners. To do so, either click "👋 introductions" in the side panel or click here
- Join the conversation: Discord is a free for all! Poke around and see what interests you
Why you should totally join Migaku's Chinese Discord server
The short answer is that we're awesome and you're awesome, so we should connect. To be specific, though:
1. You'll connect with like 10,000 people who want to learn Mandarin (and Cantonese, and other languages)
This one's pretty straightforward, man. You'll make new friends who are also language enthusiasts, and that's naturally going to benefit your own personal language study. (If nothing else, you'll at least find it interesting. You can go ahead and be a nerd here. We won't tell.)
2. We've got six perpetual conversations about Chinese learning going on
This server aims to be the hub of all your Chinese-related discussions, in both Chinese and English, and also to keep them somewhat organized:
- Chat-zh, a text channel where you can talk about anything and everything related to Chinese
- Resources, where people share the best Chinese learning resources they have found
- Media recommendations, because we learn languages by consuming content we are interested in and understanding the messages within that content
- Music, because your life isn't complete if you haven't heard of 茄子蛋 or 宋冬野 (no, really, please click those links)
- 中文-繁體, a place for people who want to speak Mandarin (particularly Taiwanese Mandarin), or find native speakers to be language partners with
- 中文-筒体, a place for people who want to speak Mandarin (particularly Chinese Mandarin), or find native speakers to be language partners with
3. You can get honest takes about how to learn Chinese with Migaku (and other apps)
I'll be upfront with you—I've been learning languages for over 10 years, and I'm convinced that Migaku is the best Chinese learning app on the market. By far.
If you're a beginner, we've got a course that walks you through ~300 basic Chinese grammar points and the ~1,500 most common Chinese vocabulary words. It's a flashcard-based course that has been very carefully arranged such that each next card contains only one new piece of information, giving it a super smooth learning curve. By the time you finish, you'll understand over 80% of the words you see in modern Chinese media. It's pretty awesome. Here's a sneak peek:
Once you finish the course, you'll be ready to see Migaku's real strength. Our Chrome Extension and mobile apps make Chinese text you encounter in subtitles and web pages interactive, enabling you to just click on new words to see what they mean:
This is a massive advantage, in my opinion. You can see that this YouTube video is a bit difficult for me—I don't know 27% of the words, meaning that one in four is new to me—but that's not a huge deal when I can just click on words to see what they mean. I can watch this pretty comfortably with Migaku, but I might not be able to follow without it. It's basically a super power.
(I'm understandably biased, but if you join our Discord server, you can ask other people if Migaku is really that great.)
4. You can find accountability buddies, share pictures of your lunch, and stuff like that
This way you can share your dankest memes without clogging up a group chat that isn't about dank memes. You're happy, they're happy, everybody's happy.
For those times when you decide that you shan't engage in learning, you may wish to peruse our hub of "fun stuff", which includes:
- Off-topic, which I'm not going to explain
- 🍡 Food, because we all know you're learning Chinese because 粽子 (zong4zi5) are delicious
- 💪 Shred City, for your gains in the gym
- 🐙 Server Emoji Suggestions, which would be the place to share the aforementioned dank memes
- 🎮 Visual novels and games because, let's face it, we're all nerds here
5. ... and more
There's quite a lot here, to be honest! We also have chat rooms for other languages, like Japanese or Spanish. You can also follow Migaku's updates, study out loud in a few voice channels, and generally browse. At the very least, it'll be more productive than scrolling Instagram or Reddit.
Anyway...
Join us today by clicking the big "Join" button down under "You might also be interested in...", or the big orange button right here, and let's learn together. Everyone is welcome, and we hope to see you there!