Best Apps to Learn Chinese in 2026: Tones, Characters, Two Tracks

Last updated: August 2026. Written by Josh Hutcheson, OnlineCourseing editor. Tutor counts, tutor rates, app pricing and course availability verified directly against each provider’s own pages on 9–10 August 2026. See our review methodology.

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Chinese punishes the one-app plan harder than any language we cover. Most language apps are built on a quiet assumption: that the sounds are learnable from an alphabet, and the writing is just spelling. Mandarin breaks both halves of that assumption. The sounds carry tones — four of them plus a neutral tone — and the writing system has no alphabet to spell with. The word ma can mean “mother,” “horse,” or a question mark depending on the pitch contour you say it with, and none of those meanings is visible in the letters m-a.

That is why this page is organised differently from a normal app ranking. Chinese is a two-track language: speaking-and-listening runs on one track, reading-and-writing on another, and progress on one buys you surprisingly little on the other. The honest recommendation is a stack of small tools, each doing one job well, with real human conversation added earlier than most people think. Here is the stack, and the reasoning.

The two tracks, and what covers each

Track one is sound: tones, pinyin (the romanisation system you will type with), listening, speaking. Track two is script: recognising characters, then reading connected text, then — optionally — writing by hand. The apps below sort cleanly into these tracks, and the biggest waste of money in Chinese learning is paying for an app that is strong on the track you did not need help with.

Mandarin or Cantonese? Answer this before installing anything

Almost every app on this page teaches Mandarin — the standardised form used in mainland China, Taiwan and Singapore, and the one with more first-language speakers than any other language on earth. italki literally labels its category “Chinese (Mandarin),” and Duolingo’s course is Mandarin in simplified characters. Cantonese — the language of Hong Kong, Macau and much of the overseas diaspora — is a different spoken language with its own tone system, and mainstream apps barely touch it. If your goal is Cantonese (family, Hong Kong, Cantonese media), skip the app aisle almost entirely and go straight to a tutor: the marketplaces are the one place with real Cantonese-speaking teachers. Everything else on this page assumes Mandarin.

Simplified or Traditional characters?

Chinese is written with one of two character sets. Simplified characters are standard in mainland China and Singapore; Traditional characters are standard in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Most learners aiming at the mainland, HSK exams, or business Chinese learn simplified; learners with ties to Taiwan or Hong Kong usually want traditional. The practical trap: many apps quietly teach only one set. Duolingo’s course, for instance, is Chinese (Simplified) — that is its actual course name. Before you commit months to any tool, check which set it teaches. A dictionary like Pleco handles the lookup problem either way, which is one more reason it goes first.

Pleco — install this before anything else

Pleco is not a course. It is the Chinese-English dictionary app, and it is the closest thing this niche has to a universal recommendation — ask any serious learner what is on their phone and Pleco is there. The developer has been building it since 2001, and the app folds four tools into one: licensed dictionaries (including titles from Oxford, Brill and FLTRP), an OCR mode that reads characters live through your camera, handwriting lookup where you draw an unknown character on screen, and a tap-to-look-up document reader. On Google Play it holds a 4.6-star rating across 44,200+ reviews with over five million installs.

It is free to install, with the serious extras sold as in-app purchases. Why it goes first: on both tracks — sound and script — your bottleneck from week two onward is “what does this word mean and how is it pronounced?”, and Pleco answers that faster than anything else. It is also the tool that makes the real world legible: menus, signs and packaging stop being wallpaper the day you install the camera lookup.

HelloChinese — the best first month

HelloChinese is the beginner app built specifically for Mandarin rather than adapted to it, and the difference shows exactly where it matters: tones are drilled from the first lesson, with speech recognition scoring your pronunciation, plus handwriting practice and short native-speaker videos. The company claims more than 20 million users and a 4.9 rating from 500,000+ reviews — their figures, but consistent with its reputation in the Chinese-learning community. The lesson style is game-like in the Duolingo mould, except the game is teaching you the parts of Mandarin that Duolingo undertrains.

The app publishes no price on its homepage, so check the in-app upgrade screen for current rates. Treat HelloChinese as your structured daily lesson for the first three to six months — it is the best on-ramp in the niche — and expect to outgrow it, which is normal and fine.

Pimsleur — tones by ear, hands free

Pimsleur’s method is thirty-minute audio lessons built on spaced recall — you hear, you answer out loud, the prompts return at widening intervals. For a tonal language this format earns its keep, because you are forced to produce the tones from memory rather than recognise them on a screen. The Mandarin program runs five levels on a subscription of roughly $20 a month with a 7-day free trial, and it is the strongest pick here for commuters and anyone who wants real speaking practice before booking a human.

Honesty note: we currently have no affiliate relationship with Pimsleur — we earn nothing if you subscribe. It stays on this list because for ear-first learners it is genuinely the best at what it does. Its weakness is the script track: audio teaches you no characters, so pair it with the reading tools below.

Anki — free, and the retention engine for characters

Anki is a spaced-repetition flashcard system: free on desktop, free on Android via AnkiDroid, and unlovely to look at everywhere. It matters in Chinese for one reason — volume. A functional reading vocabulary means thousands of characters and words, and spaced repetition is the only study method that scales to that number without your review load exploding. Shared decks for HSK vocabulary and common characters mean you can start reviewing in minutes. If Pleco is the tool you use most in the wild, Anki is the tool that decides whether last month’s characters are still yours next month. Pleco’s own flashcard add-on covers similar ground if you would rather pay once to keep everything in one app.

Du Chinese — learn to read without drowning

The gap between “I know 300 characters” and “I can read a page” is where most self-taught learners stall. Du Chinese exists for exactly that gap: a library of 3,000+ readings and 80+ graded stories across six levels from Newbie to Master, each with audio, a tap-for-definition dictionary and flashcards built in. You read real connected Chinese at a difficulty that is deliberately slightly below your frustration point, which is how reading fluency actually forms. The app reports over a million downloads and a 4.8+ store rating, offers a genuine free tier to start, and sells the full library by subscription — check current pricing in the app.

Skritter — only if you want to write by hand

Skritter teaches character handwriting — you draw each character and get stroke-level grading in real time, with spaced-repetition scheduling deciding what you practise next. It costs $14.99 a month, $59.99 for six months, or $99.99 a year, each with a 7-day trial. The honest question first: do you need handwriting at all? If your Chinese future is typing — and typing runs on pinyin, so it needs recognition, not recall — you can defer handwriting indefinitely. Learn it if you are taking classes or exams that require it, if you have a heritage connection to the written language, or if you simply find that writing characters makes them stick. For that learner, Skritter is the best tool in the category.

Preply and italki — where your tones get fixed

Here is the uncomfortable truth about tones: apps can grade your pronunciation, but only a human can hear why yours is wrong and drill the fix in real time. Fossilised tone errors are the classic self-taught-Mandarin injury, and they are far cheaper to prevent than to repair. That is why we push conversation earlier for Chinese than for most languages — from roughly month two or three, not “when I’m ready.”

Preply lists 8,318 Chinese tutors — the second-largest bench of any language on the platform after English (for scale: French has 6,203, Japanese 4,942, Korean 3,413, German 2,883). The platform shows an average tutor rating of 4.97/5 from 61,194 learner reviews. Listed rates run from about $14 an hour to $56, with most tutors clustering at $22–$40/hr — see our Preply cost breakdown for how billing works. italki lists 1,008 Chinese (Mandarin) tutors and tends to attract slightly more experienced self-directed learners; our Preply vs italki comparison covers the structural differences. Either works. The move that matters is booking a weekly slot and treating tone correction as its standing agenda.

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LingChat — AI conversation before you’re ready for a person

If the idea of stumbling through tones in front of a human is what is stopping you, LingChat covers the awkward middle: AI conversation practice with Mandarin explicitly supported, available at whatever hour your confidence shows up, with none of the social cost of a bad session. Its pricing is best checked on its own site. Use it as a bridge — a few weeks of low-stakes practice to build fluency reflexes — not as a permanent substitute for the human feedback that actually repairs tone errors.

Babbel does not teach Chinese — and neither does Lingoda

Worth stating plainly, because both brands advertise heavily enough that people search for it: Babbel has no Chinese course. We checked its live course catalogue in August 2026 — thirteen languages, all European except Indonesian and Turkish. That is not an oversight; Babbel’s method leans on cognates and English-adjacent grammar, which is exactly what Mandarin does not offer (our Babbel cost guide covers what it does teach). Lingoda teaches five languages — English, German, French, Spanish and Italian — and no Chinese either. If you were budgeting for either of them, redirect that money to a tutor block or the reading tools above.

Where Duolingo fits

Duolingo’s Chinese (Simplified) course has 9.27 million learners, and the app is unmatched at one thing: making you show up every day. As a zero-cost habit anchor alongside the real stack, it is fine. The problems are the two tracks this page keeps returning to: its tone training is shallow next to HelloChinese’s, and its character teaching gives you recognition drills without the volume or structure that Anki, Du Chinese and Pleco provide. Treat it as a supplement you never pay for, not a plan.

The HSK question, briefly

If you have researched Chinese exams you have met the HSK, and possibly two contradictory descriptions of it. Both are real: the exam system is mid-transition. The long-standing structure is six levels; the official standards have been upgraded to a “Three Stages, Nine Levels” framework, with levels 7–9 offered as a combined advanced tier — the official test site currently shows registration for levels 1–6 plus a combined 7–9. What this means for app choice: many apps and decks still label content with the old six levels. That is not a defect, just a lag — but if a certificate matters to you, check which framework your target institution asks for before you pick a study path.

How hard is Chinese, really?

Hard enough that the US Foreign Service Institute — which trains American diplomats in languages full time — organises its language school into four instructional divisions, and one of them is literally named “Arabic & Chinese.” Chinese sits in the hardest tier FSI teaches, alongside the other languages that share almost nothing with English. But the two-track lens makes the difficulty more navigable than the reputation suggests: spoken Mandarin has no verb conjugation, no gender, no plurals and no tenses in the European sense — the grammar is genuinely friendly. The cost is loaded into tones and characters. Which is exactly why the stack above splits the work the way it does: pour your early effort into sound with a human checking it, build characters as a steady daily habit, and neither track has to block the other.

A realistic first six months

• Weeks 1–2: Install Pleco. Learn pinyin and the four tones properly — HelloChinese’s opening units do this well. Decide Mandarin vs Cantonese and simplified vs traditional now, not in month four.
• Months 1–3: HelloChinese daily as the spine. Add Pimsleur if you are ear-first or commute. Start an Anki deck for everything you meet; do not skip review days.
• Month 2–3: Book your first tutor session — earlier than feels comfortable. One weekly slot, standing agenda: tones and pronunciation. LingChat in between if human sessions feel expensive to waste on stumbling.
• Months 3–6: Add Du Chinese at Newbie level and climb. If handwriting matters to you, add Skritter now; if not, explicitly decide to skip it.
• Month 6: Take stock: you should hold a slow basic conversation, read a few hundred characters in context, and know which track needs the next block of effort.

Frequently asked questions

Does Babbel teach Chinese?

No. Babbel’s live catalogue lists thirteen languages — mostly European, plus Indonesian and Turkish — and Chinese is not among them. Lingoda does not teach Chinese either; it covers English, German, French, Spanish and Italian. For Mandarin you need Chinese-specific tools: a dictionary, a tone-aware beginner app, a characters system and a tutor.

What is the best free app for learning Chinese?

Two, used together: Pleco as your dictionary — free to install, with camera and handwriting lookup — and Anki for spaced-repetition review, free on desktop and Android. Duolingo’s free Chinese (Simplified) course works as a daily habit anchor, but its tone and character training is too shallow to carry you alone.

How much does a Chinese tutor cost?

On Preply, listed rates for its 8,318 Chinese tutors run from about $14 to $56 an hour, with most tutors clustering between $22 and $40. italki’s 1,008 Mandarin tutors span a broadly similar range, with community tutors cheaper than certified professional teachers. One weekly lesson focused on tones is the highest-value hour in a Chinese budget.

Should I learn Mandarin or Cantonese?

Mandarin, unless you have a specific reason: family, Hong Kong, or Cantonese media. Mandarin is the standardised form across mainland China, Taiwan and Singapore, and nearly every app teaches it. Cantonese is a distinct spoken language with its own tones and little app support — tutor marketplaces are the realistic route to learning it.

Should I learn simplified or traditional characters?

Simplified if your target is mainland China, Singapore, or the HSK exams; traditional for Taiwan or Hong Kong. Check which set an app teaches before committing — Duolingo’s course, for example, is simplified only. Pleco handles dictionary lookups for both sets, so it is safe to install before you have decided.

How many HSK levels are there now?

The system is in transition. The long-standing exam has six levels, and the official standards have been upgraded to a “Three Stages, Nine Levels” framework, with levels 7–9 run as one combined advanced test. The official test site currently lists levels 1–6 plus the combined 7–9 band, while many apps still label content with the old six levels.

The verdict

Chinese rewards learners who respect its structure: two tracks, small tools, human feedback early. The minimum viable stack costs almost nothing — Pleco free, Anki free, HelloChinese’s free tier, Duolingo if you want the streak — and the two purchases that most move the needle are a graded-reading subscription (Du Chinese) once you know a few hundred characters, and a weekly tutor hour from about month two, which is the single best defence against the tone errors that self-taught Mandarin is famous for. Skip anything that promises all of Chinese in one subscription; the language does not work that way, and the tools that admit it are the ones that deliver.

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Comparing across languages? Our best language-learning apps guide zooms out, and the sibling breakdowns for Japanese and Korean cover the other two-script languages in the family. At the opposite end of the difficulty scale, there’s our Italian guide — a Category I language with its own trap.