🇨🇳 The best tools for learning Chinese (Mandarin)

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.

A collaborative, Creative Commons-licensed corpus you can search for real usage of a word or download in bulk to build your own decks. It is the raw material behind Clozemaster and countless Anki decks rather than a study tool in itself. Sentences are contributed by volunteers, so quality and naturalness vary — prefer sentences from native contributors and cross-check anything surprising.

Type a word or phrase and it plays back real YouTube clips of people saying it in context, across 25 languages plus sign languages, so you get natural intonation and regional variation rather than an isolated dictionary recording. Free, donation-supported, no account needed. Complements Forvo: Forvo for single words, YouGlish for phrases and prosody.

A free chart where you click any initial-final combination to hear it in each tone, with short video lessons on the sounds English speakers get wrong (zh/ch/sh vs j/q/x, the ü vowel, the third-tone sandhi). Working through this before you memorise vocabulary saves months of fossilised pronunciation errors. It is a reference tool, not a course, so pair it with feedback from a teacher or tutor.

A free, open-source Chrome extension that turns the whole Chinese web into readable material: hover for pinyin, definition and word segmentation, with keyboard shortcuts to save words for export to Anki. It is the cheapest way to start reading native articles rather than textbook passages. Purely a lookup crutch — it will not make you learn anything unless you also review what you save.

Modern assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) will roleplay a scenario at your level, correct your writing with explanations, generate graded reading, and hold voice conversations — endlessly patient and available at 2am, which no tutor is. Free tiers are enough for text practice; voice modes generally need a subscription. The caveats are real: models are noticeably weaker and more error-prone in lower-resource languages, they tend to produce bland textbook register rather than how people actually speak, and they will not correct you unless you explicitly ask them to.

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.

Around 6 million words recorded by native speakers across 400+ languages, usually with several accents per word so you can hear regional variation. Free to search on the site; the paid tiers are aimed at API users and bulk audio downloads. Indispensable for names, place names and anything a TTS voice would mangle — many learners wire it directly into Anki for card audio.

A Chrome extension that shows target-language and native subtitles simultaneously, lets you click any word for a definition, replay a line, and save phrases for review. The free tier already covers dual subs, dictionary lookups and the CEFR-graded video catalogue; Pro (about $6/month) adds machine translation, speech recognition and better AI lookups. It transforms passive Netflix time into study time, but you need enough of a base — roughly B1 — for subtitle mining to beat just watching.

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.

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 browser extension plus web reader covering 100+ languages: click a word or drag across a phrase, get an inline translation, and it becomes a flashcard automatically. The free tier gives unlimited single-word translations but caps phrases and AI explanations at 10 a day; Premium is $6/month. Simpler and cheaper than LingQ or Migaku if all you want is frictionless reading of articles and ebooks.

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.

A vocabulary SRS built only for Mandarin: import HSK levels, Integrated Chinese chapters or your own lists, and it schedules reviews with sensible defaults instead of Anki's endless configuration. Good for people who want spaced repetition to just work. It is a paid subscription doing something Anki does free, and like all SRS it teaches recognition, not usage — pair it with reading.

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.

Built by linguists working from excavated bronze and oracle-bone forms, it explains for each character which parts carry sound and which carry meaning, correcting a lot of folk etymology that circulates in learner circles. It installs inside Pleco, so it fits your existing lookup habit. It is a one-time paid add-on and it assumes you already read some Chinese — buying it at beginner level is premature.

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.