HelloChinese - Learn Chinese

I love, love, LOVE this app! It is engaging and fun. As a teacher, I appreciate being able to see the careful, thoughtful design of building and reviewing vocabulary and grammatical structures over time, across lessons. I think it has a brilliant balance of activities from putting words in the right order to finding the answer to a question to speaking and having that evaluated to listening to videos of people saying a sentence and then writing the sentence. That last one is my favorite because it’s so authentic. People speak at their normal speeds, in their normal styles, which might be mumbly, and you have to listen well plus think about what they probably would have said, i.e., the grammar, if you couldn’t really catch all of the words. I have added half an hour into my morning routine before work in order to do the app because it’s so fun!! Downsides: I am not impressed with the games, especially that they don’t seem to test me at my current learning level (rather WAY earlier). Also, the immersion lessons, while cool in theory, are too long for me. I think they should be 5 quick minutes only. Finally, DEVELOPERS, WHY DID YOU TAKE THE FLASHCARDS AWAY??? I REALLY miss them!!!!

Great app for learning Mandarin-Chinese. Some of the really great features is that you can download the lesson plans of the next course to study offline. Also, you will see clips of speakers and have to translate or interpret what they said, and sometimes their pronunciation is terrible and even my native speaker friends struggle to figure out what they’re saying, so it is good prep for real conversations. Also depending on whether you want to learn Simplified (Mainland) or Traditional (Taiwan), you can toggle the writing. The premium games are also pretty helpful in reinforcing practice. Also great that you can toggle between pinyin, characters, or pinyin+characters. However, I’d ask the developers to maybe consider letting users toggle between the 3 options on a per word basis. Pinyin is meant to be a crutch to help new learners, but it’s a bit tough to just instantly turn off completely for all 500+ words in the app. It would be helpful to be able to selectively convert one word at a time from pinyin+characters to just characters (i.e. memorise 我=wo, then going forward turn off seeing “wo/我” and just see ”我”). I think it would really help learners master the characters.

This was the first app I used to learn Mandarin, and I’ve since tried Rosetta Stone, Duolingo, and a few others. This is by far the most intuitive way to learn the basics of the language that I have found. There are certainly areas that could use improvement; I wish we could learn to write all of the characters in the lessons instead of just some (the writing system itself is excellent though). I also wish it included more lessons in speaking and pronunciation, with suggestions on how to fix pronunciation when you’re incorrect. (Side note: sometimes when I’m speaking, it says I’m repeatedly pronouncing a word incorrectly, but when I long press to practice that individual word I get 5.0 stars. When it goes back, it still says I’m wrong. Not sure if this a glitch.) That being said, I love being able to see both the hanyu and the characters, then being able see just the characters (some apps make it impossible to learn the characters, and others throw you right into the deep end. I highly recommend this app to any beginners interested in learning Chinese.

Been using this app for four months and I can easily say this is the best, most effective language learning app I’ve ever used — hands down. I’ve used a number of language apps not just for Chinese but also Korean and Japanese, and nothing compares to this. They guide you along a path of lessons with each lesson building on the last which allows you to better memorize vocabulary and grammar. They don’t just throw phrases at you without explaining grammar rules like Duolingo. The app takes seriously the explanation of grammar structures so that you can take these grammar structures and formulate your own sentences around them. Pronunciation is also taken seriously as each lesson and test will ask you to say sentences and vocabulary out loud. One section of each lesson is solely dedicated to pronunciation. When I flew to California for a visit after 3 months of study, I talked to some Chinese native speakers who explicitly noted that my pronunciation was surprisingly on point.

I have been using this app to supplement my private lessons with 中文。I love the easy-to-use, cute interface. The APP itself has a host of benefits: they provide native 中国人 speakers to present lots of the dialogue; roleplay/voice dubbing practice; 汉字 stroke order tracing (with and without a guide!); lots of listening and speaking assignments with and without visual clues; etc! All of the language presented and tested are relevant and necessary words for learning Chinese, and they do a great job explaining the rules and history behind the words/words’ meaning. However, there are some continual bugs that make it hard to progress through the lessons. Often times, when there’s a question with visual answers, the visuals are blank... or there’s no sound when you click the audio button on an audio question. I’ve reported these questions many times, but nothing has changed. I am hopeful, though, that the developers will get around to it — they are diligent and do a great job with updates and new content!