3 Free Apps for Learning Mandarin

Studying Chinese on the go is a lot different today than it used to be.  Gone are the days of lugging your books, CD player and dictionary with you.  Even a couple years ago, it was tough to find apps that would support learning to read and write characters.  Today, the Internet is rife with free apps for learning Chinese.  These are some of the best for beginners.

1.  Chinese Skill
This app has a lot of features.  Each lesson contains grammar and vocabulary, both written and spoken.  It even grades your pronunciation.  It has a good balance of repetition and review and new topics.  The lessons do go a bit fast, but there are immersion lessons and games to help you round out your practice.  The downside of the immersion lessons is that there is no translation even though the dialogues presented contain vocabulary that isn't necessarily covered in the lesson.  You can also test out at one level if you have already had some basic Mandarin. All of this is completely free. 
The content is geared to adults, but kids can still use it and not learn anything inappropriate. 

2.  Hello Chinese
This app has many of the same features as Chinese and the lesson structure is very similar.  Immersion lessons are a paid feature, so this app is less able to be used on it's own in the free version.  A positive feature is that it allows you to test out on multiple levels.  Another positive feature is that it links to the Hello Chinese webcasts, which contain interesting cultural information.    Again, the content is geared towards adults but ok for kids. 

3.  Duolingo
This app is up and coming.  It is developed by users, so the content is likely to evolve considerably over the years. A downside to Duolingo is that it does not grade your pronunciation or cover handwriting at all.  The lessons I saw strictly cover vocabulary and sentence construction/grammar.  Duolingo does not let you test out of levels.  Instead, it has a placement test.  Unfortunately, the curriculum seems to be organized in a linear fashion, so that if you have already learned ba structures and the use of de adverbial phrases, but somehow you don't hear the test saying "wo men" instead of "wo", you could get placed at the beginning of the lesson sequence anyway.  However, it is useful for review of vocabulary, listening skills, and grammar.


The downside of any app is that you aren't forced to write characters over and over again, which is probably necessary to memorize them faster.  Also, the dialogues are necessarily very rigidly constructed, so that you can't review a lot of vocabulary at once.   While not a substitute for a live classroom or tutoring type experience, these apps certainly can help you learn new skills and hone old ones.  I felt that using apps was especially helpful for learning new grammar and in monitoring my pronunciation.