HelloChinese - Learn Chinese Reviews

by Nothanksforanickname

HelloChinese is great and how they teach the language is very acceptable. They offer reviews that could be a little more mixed in what you have already learned besides a random group of questions from one lesson you learned at a time. The biggest problem HelloChinese has is honestly enough to make me look for other apps to use and it’s such an easy one to fix: they have questions that ask you to translate the native speaker in a video. They are almost always filmed outdoors and with people who seem to want to do anything but say the sentence. Zero quality control here makes these videos a huge annoyance and they can’t be skipped. They have an option to slow the audio but sometimes that makes it even worse because all the speakers mumble horribly. I have reported nearly every video I’ve come across in HelloChinese . But to be honest the further I get into the lessons the worse the video quality and speaker clarity gets. How anyone was stupid enough to think this awful attempt at a native speaker attempt was good is beyond me. If these parts were able to be skipped or done with an ounce of professionalism HelloChinese would be great.

by Michellealicecee

Very frustrated with the lack of transparency and deceptive promotion of an educational platform that should be more easily accessible to users. There is no advance notice when you start the main course (nor on the HelloChinese ’s page in HelloChinese Store) that you can only get through a limited number of lessons before you are asked to pay a premium subscription fee in order to access the rest of the course. Nor is there any guidance anywhere on HelloChinese that makes it known to users that the basic course is available instead without the premium subscription. This is entirely a bait and switch scheme. HelloChinese is otherwise great with its informative lessons and use of a variety of educational tools, including speaking practice, but the utter lack of transparency with respect to the paywall setup really undermines the value of HelloChinese. A clear, advance disclaimer of when users are expected to pay up a subscription fee during the course or a trial basis expressly made for a preliminary number of lessons would prevent such misleading design.

by Lotusindigo

this app is a fun, easy to follow program. You're given a variety of options to adjust the level of difficulty, as well as many supplemental learning tools such as flash cards, games, videos. It covers all the aspects of the Chinese language, including but not limited to proper pronunciation, reading both pinyin and traditional characters, as well as writing/typing pinyin and traditional characters. There is an achievement point system that allows you to access more content, and there is something satisfying about working my way down the curriculum path. I'd recommend HelloChinese to anyone wanting to learn to read, speak and write in Chinese. ETA (2021): I’ve returned to this app after a long hiatus and was glad to see there was a new, more comprehensive course available. However, they have done away with the games section for the new course and according to support there are no plans to reintroduce it. This is false advertisement considering that the Premium subscription claims that you have unlimited access to all training games. You can access the games still, but in order to play them you have to progress in the old course (which is redundant to and goes in a different order from the new course). That’s a huge limitation if you ask me, not to mention a huge inconvenience. The games were a big part of why I used to love HelloChinese, so my new rating and amended review is going to reflect that.

by Calion

I'm coming from Duolingo, and HelloChinese is better in most ways than Duolingo. There really are only two ways it's inferior: It's less polished, pretty and well-organized; and the fastest speaking speed is still too slow (Duolingo doesn't, unlike this app, allow you to change how fast HelloChinese speaks (I mean, it's got a "slow down" button in many places, but no overall customization), but Duolingo's default speed is better than this app's fastest speed).

In almost every other way, this app is superior, sometimes vastly so.

• It provides writing exercises that teaches you how to write Chinese characters.
• It always provides a literal translation of every Chinese word or phrase (so helpful, and my main frustration with Duolingo)
• It allows you to turn on and off (or dim!) the Pinyin (phonetic) words over the Chinese characters—helpful when you do or don't want "hints", or want to learn the pronunciation or Pinyin spelling
• Premium membership is actually useful, providing mini-lectures and other useful tools (not sure Premium+ is worth it though)

And in general, the lesson structure makes me feel like I'm actually *learning Chinese,* rather than getting good at the translation tasks Duolingo focuses on.

this app is not perfect—there are tons of tweaks that would make it better. But it's definitely the best resource I've tried for learning Chinese.

by Glassofwonder

I have been using HelloChinese to supplement my private lessons with 中文。I love the easy-to-use, cute interface. HelloChinese 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!

by OnlyByGod'sGrace

惊人！It is extremely engaging and so very helpful. I love how you can use the mic to check your pronunciation 🎉😊. I am using HelloChinese along with Fluenz Mandarin (an online program) 😍 Sooooo amazing！非常感谢。🎊 ( I don’t normally write reviews 😋..... BUT😂😏🧐 after using HelloChinese.... I realized I needed to 🤗😇😊. I should add that I made the decision to start learning Chinese about 5 months ago... I live in America and I really understood almost NOTHING of the Chinese language. American students are not really encouraged to learn Chinese😫😩😭😢....We are encouraged to learn Spanish, French etc. 🤫. Anyways 😜 As a beginner HelloChinese has done a fantastic job in starting me out. They offer so many different resources for studying. The lessons are VERY engaging and extremely helpful. Give it a try 🤗 Have a wonderful time studying 🙌🏻💪🏻👏🏻😇.

by Yeeyee-boy

HelloChinese is amazing ! I’ve only using HelloChinese started today, and I can already see how amazing it is. I’ve learned phrases and words in about an hour or two (counting doing other things such as eating and taking breaks in that timespan). It shows you how to write the characters, but not too much to the point where you’re bored with it. It has you pronounce it, and shows which areas you pronounced the word/phrase incorrectly so it’s extremely easy to fix the way you pronounce it, and the thing I really like about it is that you can go back and do lessons over again how ever many times you want if you’re not confident in that area. Overall, it’s an amazing app and 10/10, would recommend

tl;dr: shows how to write characters, shows how to pronounce words/phrases, and you can go back and do lessons again.

by Mjw1926

It pains me that Hello Chinese doesn’t reach more advanced levels or branch out into other languages. It’s teaching methods are good but it’s review system is the best in the industry by an extremely wide margin. You can easily look up terms, when you review you can see pinyin, block translation, and literal translation, it will mark words as difficult if you miss them a lot, but you can undo that if you want (e.g. the word is unimportant to you or you hit the wrong button). The spacing of the SRS is spot on, at least for me, and it tests you both Chinese to English and vice versa. It also gives XP for practice so you don’t feel the need to get out over your skis by learning new words when you haven’t mastered the old ones yet to protect a “streak” or anything like that. I’m pretty sure I’ve tried them all and HC is just miles ahead of everyone else.

My only complaint is that this review system isn’t integrated into the premium plus “immerse” feature. That seems to have a lot of content but the review is low quality so I don’t see much value in it even though the lessons seem good.

by Iamgirl1

Im a complete beginner and I started with the Chinese portion from Duolingo. It was great at first then went too fast and got confusing. I heard great things about Hello Chinese so I decided to give it a try. I haven’t been disappointed, it moves you through at a perfect rate (not too fast and not too slow) it explains why things are the way they are. This is extremely helpful. The user interface is fun, smooth and super easy to use. It’s easy to learn on with HelloChinese. The only down sides are that the voice recognition (when speaking Chinese into the mic) is off sometimes. Also when drawing the characters there is a certain character that is hard to get correctly unless you follow it to a t. But let me tell you, HelloChinese is great and the developers did a fantastic job. I’ve been using it now for 23 days and feel like I’ve learned a lot!

by ShannonLex

this is one of the best language learning apps I’ve come across. I love to learn languages and you usually cannot get it all from a single app. HelloChinese includes writing, speaking, reading/recognizing, and does it all in a cute/funny way so that you remember what you learned. The mnemonics for remembering the characters is so helpful! I really enjoy the Teacher Talk for each lesson. The listening/speaking exercises are very important since Chinese is so difficult for my English mouth to pronounce. I am so excited to have come across this in my journey to learn Chinese. At 45 years old, I’m learning a new language I always thought would just be too hard to even attempt. Definitely recommend this over Duolingo if you are learning Mandarin.

by Lianxi;))

I took a couple of Putonghua classes back in university more than 20 yrs ago. Never really had a need to speak more than a few basic sentences until recently as I’m preparing for work.

After screening a few online schools, I decided to take business level lessons from a private teacher. Initially, I was pretty confident. But by the end of the third lesson, it was clear that I needed to revisit the stuff from back in uni as well cover new territory.

this app is awesome in that it provides a fun and engaging way to learn (or review) Mandarin. It has a good mix of all the important elements needed when learning a language; reading, writing, listening and speaking. And it’s designed so that as you progress through each level, you’ll build up your vocabulary by adding new words and sentence structures to the material from previous lessons.

by GirlyGenius🤪

Looking for a quick, easy way to learn and practice Chinese? What about Duolingo? Think again. Duolingo makes you use LIMITED hearts when you miss a question. If you miss 5, you have to restart the lesson then go to practice mode, only to get 1 heart. If that‘s not bad enough, it sends emails to you everyday even if notifications are off. Just saying, your first choice should honestly be this app.
this app has amazing ways to learn this language. Under “Learn” you can do normal lessons and practice if you click on the right side leaf. If you click on “Train” you get a daily free game. The games are only available for a day but are quite helpful. Under “Immerse” click on a free tab and you can do 5 different steps to learn how to say something in Chinese.
I highly recommended HelloChinese for anyone that’s willing to learn something new.

by Elevatormusick

到今天为止，我已经用这个APP学汉语一年了。 我感觉很舒服建议这个APP对别人。什么时候我开始，我不知道任何汉语。现在我有一个基础很好。

I’ve used HelloChinese for a year, paid for premium and genuinely think it’s a great app to start learning Mandarin. When I started, I didn’t know any Mandarin. I completed the main course in about ~220 days and just do the daily review since then. It is miles better than Duolingo’s Mandarin offering. Some things I would like to see added are: more teacher talk lessons, clearer audio in the native speaker exercises, and an option to type answers in pinyin instead of picking from a word bank.

After completing the course, I started speaking to natives and expanded my vocabulary and grammar from other sources. No, you won’t reach “fluency”, but I have no doubt this app gave me a pretty strong foundation to build off of. I wish they had an app like this for Cantonese, Japanese and Korean. 谢谢你，this app.

by LooselyCanon

I think that Hello Chinese is an extremely useful tool for acquiring a good foundation for listening and reading comprehension. I appreciate that there are audio clips of native speakers and I like that they include writing practice so that I can learn the stroke order for characters. I haven’t had the opportunity to try out the paid content, but there’s a lot here just in the free content to get me started. I just started learning Chinese almost a month ago, but I can already attest to how much Hello Chinese has improved my listening comprehension alone. For language immersion, I watch Chinese dramas on Viki Rakuten and within just a week of practicing on HelloChinese, I was able to understand entire sentences of speech without looking at the subtitles. Of course, you’re going to get out of this what you put into it, but as for my and my learning style, I’m very glad that I found HelloChinese!

by 欧瑞学汉语

I normally don't write reviews, but HelloChinese is so awesome I feel obligated to promote it! HelloChinese has EVERYTHING! Flashcards to review words you've learned, games for a daily practice that covers everything you've learned in a fun way, Immersion videos to listen and speak in real life conversations, and lessons that include listening, speaking, writing, and obviously reading exercises! The voice recognition on the speaking exercises is a bit questionable, but the fact that it forces you to practice speaking in the first place makes up for this! I look forward to every update because somehow they continue to get better! They are super responsive to messages and have regular videos on requested topics. And all of that is their Free version! And they don't bug you with notifications and ads for their premium version! HelloChinese is really amazing for someone wanting to start learning or practice Mandarin! I can't speak more highly of it.

by Emtee22

Been using HelloChinese 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. HelloChinese 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.

by Djun13l

I've tried tons of apps and this one has always been my favorite for Chinese. And just when I thought it couldn’t get better, they added even more extremely helpful features! Being able to use Chinese in a convincing, conversational way is my goal (it’s painfully obvious to native speakers when awkward or inappropriately formal speech is used). So things I love about Hello Chinese include: training basic vocabulary using simple sentences, clips of native speakers so you get a feel for how things should sound, short videos of helpful situations and common conversation topics, and now they’ve added podcast episodes after lessons! The 10 min podcast after the very first lesson (I’m starting over to relearn writing) explained that nihao and zaijian aren’t typically used and should be avoided!! I had a hunch that was true but it’s amazing to have a credible source explain it in detail and I’m so thankful that they really put in work for a resource that’s mostly free!

by Glasspathways

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 HelloChinese to any beginners interested in learning Chinese.

by Found

Actually feel like real people who really understand Chinese made this, in a way that they actually want others to learn. I was not considering purchasing a subscription plan on any Chinese app but this has enough free content that I can see the value of the subscription. Really excellent content at an approachable level of difficulty. This should be made more we’ll known, as Rosetta Stone can’t hold a candle to this and DuoLingo, while good in some ways, is missing the language theory and grammar to the depth that hello Chinese has. The only thing I might want is the eventual option to learn Traditional characters at my option. Wonderful, wonderful app. Update: I do see now the Traditional Chinese Option, that is good! But now when I am asked to learn how to write a character the pictorial explanations that used to come up no longer appear. And when they did appear, it was only once. It was helpful to know where the Chinese characters came from originally, to see where the language came from. Again a wonderful app, I study every day.

by AppleNicknameSystemSucks

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 HelloChinese . 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.

by Samuelezrajacov

This is a fantastic app for learning basic Chinese. I especially love the native speaker sections and how they talk fast (normally for them) to let you get used to the cadence of the language. My only issues with HelloChinese are the pinyin options and the price for premium. There should be an option to only display pinyin on the questions, but not the answers. I want to practice tones and make sure I’m reasing the question right, but don’t want the extra assistance that having pinyin on the answers provides. Right now you can only do all pinyin or no pinyin. I also think the pricing for the premium is too high. HelloChinese is a great tool that’s accessible, but their premium prices don’t reflext the goal of their app. I get that they need to make money, but the services listed don’t seem like they’re worth $15 a month. I would suggest lowering it to $10 month-to-month or beefing up the services you provide to justify the price.

by AppleBuddy22

If you could fade out icons or (something) to indicate that we need to study more on it. Sort of like what duolingo does. I know you’ve got the review checkpoint and it tells us when we should review but I want also little chunks at a time. Because the review checkpoint has a TON of things and it would be great to do smaller sections also, and it would also be great if you could make it so I can skip the audio pronunciations in the reviews. Because that’s why I don’t do it is because I usually use HelloChinese when I’m in public and I want to do the review but then I have to exit when I remember that it doesn’t give me the option to skip the verbal pronunciation part. Thanks!

Did you guys partner with Duolingo? I see a section that says Duolingo characters or something. It’s awesome! Thanks so much!!