HelloChinese - Learn Chinese 4+

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!!!!

You will soon see the flashcards back with a much cleaner inferface. Also thank you very much for your suggestions for the games and immersion lessons. We surely will improve it and take your suggestions into consideration.

HelloChinese 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 this app to anyone wanting to learn to read, speak and write in Chinese. ETA (2021): I’ve returned to HelloChinese 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 this app, so my new rating and amended review is going to reflect that.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. Here are our explaination:
1. We put lots of efforts in developing new main course contents such as teacher talks, speaking lessons, etc., as these are more effective to our users to learn Chinese.
2. We will consider adding games in the main course.

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.

We are so glad that you shared your idea to us! In fact there is a review section for the "immerse" lessons and it's also SRS based. If your comment is about this system, please share more details about your thought about our immersive lesson review system with us at support@hellochinese.cc or issue a feedback in our app! As always, have a nice day!