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.

I’ve been studying for 7 months now and I LOVE this app. Though I also take lessons, this app has been the foundation of my daily practice and it’s made such a huge difference.

The main course will last a good while, and has 1000 words of vocab and lots of grammar. I was afraid I’d run out after that, but then realized just how deep the stories go! Listening to lots of longer-form audio is an important step after the basic grammar and short phrases. Each story is like 3-5 minutes, and there’s maybe 1000 of them? So I can listen to a few stories a day, for months, steadily ramping up the difficulty, adding new vocab words to the flashcard system for review. And it’s been so satisfying to see my comprehension ability steadily improve.

I have Premium+ and think it’s worth it, just for all the stories. (Compared to the time investment to learn a language, the money isn’t much, if it makes that time well spent.) But there are a few app elements I ignore: “immersive” (lessons are too slow and fluffy) and all the games (I think regular flashcards are better for learning). But I get that some people might like those things.

Thank you so much for your feedback! Our team of experienced Chinese teachers has meticulously designed our courses to provide the best possible learning experience. We're delighted to hear that our program has been helpful to you!

We have thousands of stories, with more being added daily. If you have any suggestions, feel free to reach out to us at support@hellochinese.cc!