HelloTalk, good for finding native language partners. maayot, you can get free bited-sized real life chinese conversation every sunday.

Hi - I have a free Chinese Idiom app that is available on Google Play for Closed Loop testing. The app is free to test and will remain free when available for general distribution. Register to test using this Google Group:- idiotastixtesters@googlegroups.com

Download Pleco.

I recommend langsbook.com, but it's not for absolute beginners. It's for intermediate to high level.

For absolute beginners, I’ve heard good things about the apps HelloChinese and SuperChinese

Also look in your local library, they might have bilingual beginner dictionaries, especially near the children’s section. 

For more intermediate learners or if you are just looking to diversify, I have complied my resources/tips here: https://youtu.be/ZNeNyu8-MCM?si=aB5K-3VfvPFsKWng 

Duchinese for reading and listening

Make sure to give a try to SuperChinese!

ask ur bf if he still remembers his childhood chinese books

Highly recommend you to try out maayot !!

I wouldn’t use apps just starting out. Go to a Chinese language course so you can have atleast some sort of formal instruction. Helps with an actual teacher that’s native. Too many nuances that you’ll need to know that an app won’t familiarize you with. After 6 months or a year then hop on apps as they just supplement what you already have figured out.

So far my favorite one is HelloChinese. I tried a few, but this one is very complete and has several fun different ways to learn stuff, including chinese culture. The free lessons are ok, but if you really want to progress I would definitely recommand paying for it

My current routine includes:

Hanly (free) - character memorization, spaced repetition, mnemonics

Ka Chinese (free, paid options exists for more intensive practice) - tone recognition

Clozemaster (free, considering switching to paid) - words usage in sentences

DuChinese (paid) - reading and word memorization

I also enjoyed the free version of Hello Chinese, but don't use it now as I have finished their free course. It was very useful!

I am in the same situation. Currently I use Duolingo, Pleco and Trainchinese. I love trainchinese very much. I even bought the lifetime version so you can combine all their app with your account. That being said, they have a free version. To learn hanzis, I use quite a new app called Hanly. The developer has done something very good, beautiful and useful.

SuperChinese has Duolingo style lessons, grammar points, speaking exercises where they show you the word you mispronounced, IA partner (each lesson have an IA section to train the topic on the lesson with + you can also create your custom scenarios), spaced repetition (a bit hidden in the "me", "knowledge bank" section), IA helper (basically embedded chatGPT that answer whatever you want), and a surprisingly alive "chat" section to speak orally Chinese with other learners. Liking it a lot.

Free up to a certain point.

The IA partner works that way: first you speak, then it's converted to text. Then we may have to adjust the text manually and then send it. It was a bit frustrating at the start, because of course it'd be easier to speak directly and get corrected immediately without text transcription.... but this way (speech to text then manually editing) is also actually quite good. It forces you to read and check what you're about to send. It also help you understand what words you've actually pronounced vs what you wanted to say.

The exercise with the AI teacher is no joke. She'll interrogate you on the movie you just watched, then ask you to translate some phrases, then ask you personal questions on the same topic. I tried to trick her and be lazy but she's really strict. If she ask you "what does Johnny want to eat" you cannot just say "pasta", she'll be a bit angry and ask you to make a proper sentence. Really feel like being back at school. I'm a bit scared of her actually.

Would definitely recommend Du Chinese for reading and listening practice. I don’t know of any great apps for speaking unfortunately.

Every student in China needs to learn English from 9 years old, we don’t have any app for doing this when I was young. I mean online app is not decisive in learning foreign languages. More important, I believe reading news every day written in Chinese, talk to someone in Chinese,and at meantime follow the courses like HSK maybe more effective. Is that right?

I like HelloChinese but it doesn't have enough speaking exercises, but the ones they do have are very sensitive to tones. They also removed a review feature a couple months back that was key to me returning to the app and learning.

Duolingo is abundant with speaking exercises but haven't used it for long (currently on a 4 day streak, started 4 days ago). Don't under estimate Duolingo, but the ads are hellaaaa annoying.

I have been using Lingodeer for Chinese for about a year now. I think they menaged the pacing of introduction of new grammer nicely. I almost never have to read the Grammer lessons and can jump right into the lessons and understand the language by using it. In the rare cases in which I am not not so sure about s.t. I can always read it up quickly. Bite sized lessons, good mixture of different tasks (if you look into the fluent Chinese kategory as well, which has vocabulary games). Some vocab on the other hand seems a bit unnecessary on low levels (like I had to learn the words for pi, giraffe, volume measures, arctic sea, and bank stuff that I'm not to interested in)

Duo has more gamification, it encourages more to come back and revisit lecturs. If you need that, and want to spend no money, duo surely is a good start. I did about half the Chinese course there to compare to lingodeer and would not change, as I feel I learned it better and more quickly on lingodeer

And a tipp on the side: it's really cool to be able to fastly talk about yourself and these apps don't necessarily include your country, hobbies and job in their base vocab - learn some extra words tailored to you or your interests!

Happy learning!

LingQ - you can import actual novels into it and with the text to speech and translate function you can read stuff above your level past the point of mental exhaustion for hours a day.

I've been loving helloChinese, but use it in tandem with tutoring, hsk workbooks and podcasts.

Use Google to search this subreddit on "best app" or "app recommendation" and you'll find many helpful answers in prior threads; this is a frequently asked question. To help you get started, read the Where to Start and FAQ links in the sidebar. For app recommendations, read these posts:

• Paid apps that are worth every cent
• Chinese learning apps

I recommend HelloChinese and the individual HSK apps, the dictionary app Pleco is extremely useful too ^^

try Loqui Flow. type chinese verbs or phrases in and lets go. works with every language

Duchinese is very useful for starting reading

I could help with Chinese on Discord app.

Learning Chinese can be tricky at first. You might want to check out CoachersOrg for more personalized lessons. It made my practice sessions feel more focused and actually helped me improve faster.

I could help with Chinese on Discord app.

我推荐deepseek，但它并没有推荐它自己。

（问下reddit评论区能发图吗？）

Is there any friend who wants to learn Chinese, I will teach you Chinese, you teach me English, you can chat and learn at the same time.

HelloChinese app, together with Pleco which is a dictionary.

HelloChinese and ChineseSkill. I also get a kick out of Mondly, great it you like dynamic feedback.

And Tofulearn for vocab.

pleco and baidu translate are great to supplement whatever quiz format app you use.

People seem to long lingodeer for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean

That said, the app I'd recommend is...italki

HelloChinese for the basics. Du Chinese for reading practice (stick to the beginner articles at first, then later you can dabble in higher level ones). Pleco as your new best friend (it's free but there are powerful paid add-ons, some of which are very worthwhile, just ask me if you want recommendations of which ones to get). Anki for flashcards if you want to make sure the vocabulary you learn never gets forgotten.

I’ve tried both Lingodeer and Hello Chinese (have had the former for a few years and used it with different languages, and just started Hello Chinese premium a few days ago). Lingodeer is decent, but I’m REALLY liking Hello Chinese for how explicit and clear it is about various finer points. I think HC would be your best bet. I also use Skritter for hanzi flashcards/writing practice, and Du Chinese as a graded reader. Pleco is an indispensable dictionary.

- HelloChinese

- Immersive Chinese

- DuChinese

Sorry to beat a dead horse, but hello Chinese is a great app. I like how they show you the literal translation for a word or sentence.

Knowing the literal translation helps you learn faster. For example, knowing “ni hao” literally means “you good” means you not only learn how to say hello, but you also learn how to say “you”, “good, and Chinese grammar all at the same time.

I use Hello Chinese pretty regularly, but not LingoDeer, so can't compare. I like Hello Chinese, especially their small video learning series (where they pick an oddly specific situation and do a deep analysis). I think the content is pretty high quality, and it follows a good flow. I also like that it follows HSK vocab and grammar flows. I have mixed thoughts about HSK in general, but the nice thing is by following it, there is at least some continuity to it and other content at the same HSK level.

Some apps/channels go completely off script, so it's hard to connect them to each other.

It's ok, and it is good to augment your Chinese, but you cannot learn a language from this app (or any app, in my opinion).

Hi, just sharing what I shared with people previously.

Chinese Self-Learning 101 (Introvert friendly, good for a start lol)

• Main teaching app: Lingodeer / ChineseSkill / HelloChinese (Compare their prices and promotions, make a pick and follow the course, do not use all at once) These are well-rated apps, but all are paid.
• Dictionary app: Pleco
• Reading app: DuChinese
• Character learning app: Hanly
• Character handwriting reference: Hanzipi (need to input Chinese character into search bar)
• Tone pronunciation guide: YouTube1, YouTube2
• Syllable pronunciation guide: YouTube3
• YouTube: Unlimited contents at different levels for your listening immersion

Tips: Master tones and pronunciation as early as possible and don't leave it to when you have become intermediate. Learn to type Chinese characters using Pinyin to gain access to more resources on the Internet so that you don't just rely on things people share but can search independently.

If you are a language enthusiast and would love to learn others like Korean, Japanese, European ones down the road, Lingodeer is good since you buy its lifetime sub once and you get all the other languages. If you only want a Chinese teaching app and nothing more, ChineseSkill or HelloChinese MIGHT be better. I am not 100% sure, personally never used them as a native speaker. But all these apps are good based on community feedback.

A dictionary like pleco is great for once you've got the basics down and just need to be able quickly look up a lot of words as you encounter them. To get to that stage I would recommend HelloChinese, there's a decent amount of free lessons

I see a lot of people suggesting language learning apps like Duolingo and Hello Chinese. These apps will make you feel good about yourself, but do yourself a favour and look further. You'll spend a lot of time on them, barely stepping out of your comfort zone to actually learn anything significant. People love and often suggest these apps (they are low effort and addictive) but ask them their level and how long they've been learning. You won't be very impressed.

Here's a list of good tools to help you in your language learning.

1. Pleco is not a glorified dictionary, it's just a dictionary. Don't be silly. Chinese had a gajillion words. A good dictionary is the single most important tool for learning Chinese. Maybe you can get away with a course or something early on, but you'll need this eventually.

2. Anki will help you learn some of those words. I suggest watching youtube videos about it as it has a learning curve. Make sure you know why we use spaced repetition, and what encoding is. Some people speedrun the most common words with Anki so they can get to a level where they can consume content. This is a good strategy, but it's easy to get wrong. I suggest you read refold.la, it's not perfect but it's the best guide I can think of for a beginner looking to get past the initial hurdle.

3. LinQ is a great driver once you learn enough to start consuming easy content. This is probably the kind of thing you're looking for, but I'm not sure if it will suit your level.

4. Use Hello Talk and Tandem for language exchange once you reach an intermediate level.

5. For upper intermediate and above you're better off just using Pleco and Anki in combination with native content.

if it is to get started with the basics, hello chinese free version is a great start. Once you have completed it you will be at a level to know enough that you can find other good resources--free or paid-- and not worry about it being a bad source or something that doesn't suit you (you will know enough to know if its worth the time/money for you individually).

The paid version of hello chinese adds great listening practice for the listening/speaking side to those basics-- you can purchase it after finishing the regular free stuff if interested.

Pleco is extremely useful for learning indeed, however you likely wouldn't be using it as much until intermediate level and beyond (when you are making your own sentences, looking up sentence structures and vocab outside of lessons, etc.) For now you can totally just treat it as a dictionary, personally I don't think it reaches full value without the paid dictionary's expansiveness, but there is no reason to pay for that before reaching those levels. The base free version is more than enough through intermediate levels :)

Happy learning

I've used both SuperChinese and HelloChinese. They are pretty similar, but for the same cost SuperChinese has much, much more content than the normal premium membership version of HelloChinese (there's premium+, haven't tried it but it's quite expensive). The SC app is less polished, but I think the way it provides learning to much higher level than HC it's still a significantly higher value.

When you get to the intermediate stage, DuChinese is expensive but quite good. It's basically a large collection of graded reading material, it's not something that will directly teach you.

Pleco is great as a dictionary. It's also really good with SuperChinese since you can have the floating Pleco button on the screen (with Android anyway) to doublecheck stuff. The SC interface makes toggling pinyin or translations awkward, and some of their word definitions are a little odd or ambiguous.

Anyway, SC would be my recommendation. Using the free version, you can earn coins and have access to the paid version part of the time. I'd say there's a pretty generous chance to evaluate it before you even start running into limits. Note: they will periodically offer you a deal for the subscription. You should be able to buy a year's service for about $45. I'd suggest waiting for that before buying it if you're going to.

Also, if you spent 30-60min/day you will probably have gone through all the content in less than a year. I've been using it consistently for about 6 months and there's still quite a bit left. I ran out of HC content 3-4 months ago.

SuperChinese has been my favorite over the years. And I’ve used a lot, HelloChinese is a close 2nd, DuoLingo isn’t too bad. Du Chinese is great for reading. Tofu Learn for flashcards. Pleco is the greatest dictionary app like you mentioned.