🇨🇳 Best Chinese (Mandarin) apps for intermediate learners

Free on desktop, Android and web; the iOS app is a one-off paid purchase that funds the project. The interface is dated and the options are overwhelming at first, but nothing beats it for retaining vocabulary over years. Most effective when you stop grinding premade decks and start mining sentences from things you actually read or watch.

Covers 14 languages along an explicit CEFR path, and its best feature is the community exchange: you submit short writing or speaking exercises and real native speakers correct them, free of charge, in exchange for you correcting theirs. The free tier is limited to core lessons; Premium unlocks grammar, offline and the full path. A solid Babbel alternative if you specifically want writing practice with human feedback.

Built on Tatoeba sentences, it drills words in context by frequency band across 50+ languages and 170+ language pairings, with a genuinely generous free tier. It explicitly starts where beginner apps end, so it is the natural 'what now?' answer for someone who finished a Duolingo tree. Sentences are crowd-sourced and occasionally awkward or oddly specific, and it teaches nothing about grammar explicitly.

Shows you where characters actually come from — ancient forms, sound components, meaning components — instead of inventing mnemonics, then feeds you sentences and short media graded to what you already know. The character-origin data is genuinely scholarly and the free tier is generous. The interface is dense and does not hold your hand, so it suits self-directed learners more than beginners who want a guided path.

Thousands of short lessons across six difficulty tiers, each with clear recorded audio, a pop-up dictionary and toggleable pinyin, so you can read comfortably from your first hundred characters. A few free lessons refresh regularly; a subscription unlocks the library. The stories are written for learners rather than native content, which is exactly what makes it work early on but also why you should graduate to real material later.

Designed for Mandarin rather than retrofitted from a European-language template, so it drills tones with speech recognition, teaches stroke order for handwriting, and lets you toggle pinyin off as you improve. The free tier covers a real beginner course; premium unlocks later units, immersion videos and extra review. It plateaus around HSK 3–4 — treat it as your first six months, not your whole plan.

Built-in correction tools let partners fix your messages inline, and the social 'moments' feed gets you corrections from strangers without arranging a call. Free for the core exchange; VIP adds more translations and simultaneous target languages. The persistent caveat is that a fair share of users treat it as a dating app, and exchange partners are unreliable — it works best once you already have some output to correct.

Import podcasts, articles or ebooks, tap unknown words for definitions, and LingQ tracks your known-word count over time. The free tier caps how many saved words you can keep, so serious use means paying (~$13/month or less annually). The interface is clunky and the built-in SRS is weaker than Anki, but the reading-plus-audio workflow with 50+ languages is hard to replicate elsewhere.

The 'learn with locals' video clips are the distinguishing feature — you hear real people at real speed rather than TTS. Be aware that Memrise moved user-created community courses off the main app in 2024 onto a separate site, which gutted what many long-time users valued most, and the app has leaned hard into AI chat features since. Fine as a phrase-and-vocabulary app for major languages; if you came for the community decks, use Anki instead.

A free, offline-capable Chinese-English dictionary with stroke-order animations, handwriting and audio search, plus paid add-ons for OCR (point your camera at a menu or sign), document reading and extra dictionaries. The free version alone is better than any competitor; the paid bundles are one-time purchases rather than a subscription. Its flashcard system is powerful but fiddly — many people pair Pleco for lookup with a separate SRS. Simplified and traditional both supported.

Aimed squarely at the hardest transition in Chinese — from graded readers to native text — by making any Chinese webpage or imported file tappable for pinyin, definitions and text-to-speech, with difficulty estimates for novels. Reading itself is free; premium adds sync, offline and sentence translation. Best once you have roughly HSK 4 vocabulary; below that even with lookups the novels are a slog.

A 501(c)(3) nonprofit: you shadow native audio, record your own version, and a real human coach returns feedback — 10 free submissions a month, unlimited for about $20/month, with full scholarships for anyone who needs one. Covers French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and English. It only fixes pronunciation and delivery, so it complements rather than replaces conversation practice.

Same idea as HelloTalk but with vetted profiles and a cleaner focus on actual voice and video calls, which makes it noticeably less spammy in practice. Free to use; Pro adds unlimited partner search and extra languages, and the app also sells paid tutors. Both apps live or die on finding one or two committed partners, so expect to message a lot of people before anything sticks.

A news-based graded reader adding articles daily across levels roughly mapped to HSK 1–6, each with human-recorded audio, one-tap dictionary and exportable vocabulary. Because the content is current events rather than invented stories, it keeps intermediate learners reading when textbook dialogues get boring. Free sample lessons exist but the useful volume is behind a subscription, and simplified characters dominate.

Subscription-only after a handful of free intro lessons, typically $10–15/month with big discounts on annual plans. Lessons are short, dialogue-first and explain grammar properly, which makes it a much more serious beginner course than Duolingo. It covers only 13 languages and effectively stops around B1, so it is a stepping stone rather than a destination.

You listen to and repeat thousands of native-recorded sentences on a spaced schedule, which builds fluent output patterns without explicit grammar study. It covers 60+ languages and keeps nine minority languages (Catalan, Welsh, Taiwanese, Kurdish and others) permanently free as a preservation effort. It is expensive at roughly $20–40/month, and the repetition is monotonous — most reviewers call it effective but overpriced, so try the 7-day trial first.

A streaming service where every show has clickable dual subtitles and saved words become flashcards, covering 15 languages with apps on phone, Roku and TV. It solves the 'what do I watch' problem for languages where Netflix's catalogue is thin. The library is much smaller than a mainstream streamer and it is subscription-only — if you already pay for Netflix, Language Reactor's free tier does most of the same job.

Lessons build outward from real conversations with colour-coded literal translations and cultural notes, and the catalogue includes endangered and indigenous languages nobody else covers. Retail pricing starts around $10/month, but a very large number of public libraries and universities give patrons free access — check yours before paying. Content depth per language is modest, so it suits travellers and early learners more than people pushing toward B2.

The heavyweight immersion toolkit: one-click sentence mining with audio, screenshot and definitions, plus its own SRS and known-word tracking, for 11 languages including Japanese, Korean, Mandarin and the major European ones. A 10-day free trial then a subscription (roughly $10/month). Overkill unless you are committed to a sentence-mining routine — if that describes you it saves hours a week, otherwise Language Reactor's free tier is enough.

Thirty-minute audio lessons force you to produce sentences out loud before you see anything written, which builds unusually good accent and recall. Subscriptions run about $15–21/month (all-access covers 50+ languages), and older courses are often available through public libraries. It is slow and vocabulary-light by design, so pair it with reading — but for commute or walking time it is the best use of otherwise dead hours.

You write characters with a finger or stylus and it marks stroke order and shape in real time, scheduling reviews so you actually retain them; it ships with HSK, Integrated Chinese and other textbook lists. Only Chinese and Japanese are supported, which is why it is here rather than in the general tools. Roughly $15/month or $100/year after a 7-day trial, and it is worth it only if handwriting is genuinely one of your goals — many learners reasonably skip production of characters entirely.

Unlike most apps it is built around producing speech: you repeat, roleplay and converse with an AI tutor that gives pronunciation and phrasing feedback in real time. Covers Spanish, French, Korean, Japanese, Italian and Chinese for English speakers, with a 7-day trial then a subscription (roughly $20/month or $99/yr). Good for overcoming the fear of speaking before your first human lesson, but an AI will not push back or drift off-script the way a real conversation partner does.