HelloChinese Review: Top Gamified App for Beginners in Chinese

HelloChinese has become a popular app choice for Chinese learners, with native speaker videos, graded stories, well-designed lessons and other engaging features. But does it really live up to the hype?

I’ve taken the time to test out and review HelloChinese so you can make a more informed decision on whether or not this app is right for you.

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)

What Is HelloChinese?

HelloChinese is a Chinese learning app for mobile devices. It uses a daily learning goal approach to help you attain a conversational level of Chinese. There are over 1,000 graded stories, more than 2,000 videos, progress tracking and more.

HelloChinese boasts quite a few features:

• Chinese speech recognition
• The ability to write 汉字 (hànzì) — Chinese characters by hand
• Game-based lessons
• Video clips of native speakers
• Pinyin course
• Customizable and personalized interface
• HSK-based learning levels
• Mini curricula for different language needs
• Study progress trackers
• Offline access
• Traditional and simplified Chinese character support

HelloChinese is available for both Android and iOS devices. It’s free to download but features ads, and there are in-app purchases available.

How HelloChinese Works

Lesson Topics and Exercises

At a glance, the app is very clean and user-friendly. The homepage or “Learn” section has a map that shows the trajectory of your lessons, with sections like Introduction, Hello, School 1 and so on.

Each module on HelloChinese takes around 5-10 minutes to finish, and I found them pretty engaging because they give you a variety of exercises. For example, I was asked to translate sentences, practice listening comprehension and even say sentences out loud so the app can give me feedback on my pronunciation.

I also saw short clips of native speakers saying the vocabulary, which helped me remember the words better.

Grammar Notes

As the lessons progressed, I was asked to translate full sentences, which involved basic elements of Chinese grammar. When this happened, HelloChinese highlighted the grammar word in gold.

I could tap on the word to get a detailed explanation of it, like this explanation of 是 (shì).

 

Stories

The next section, “Stories,” features reading material in Chinese arranged by level. These range from story series to articles about Chinese culture, and you can listen to the story being read out loud, tap on individual words to get their meaning and take a quiz afterward.

Immerse

You’ll also see a third section, “Immerse,” that consists of immersive lessons. Most of these are behind a paywall, but the top section includes all of the free lessons in one group.

Each “Immerse” lesson contains a video you have to watch first. After watching the video, you learn the key words and grammar. Then there’s an audio class, which is followed by a dialogue to learn and then exercises.

Practice

This section includes two specialized courses: Pronunciation and Chinese Characters.

The pronunciation course explains pinyin in-depth. You learn all the syllables over three lessons and the Chinese tones. The course ends with a quiz.

The Chinese Characters course includes an introduction lesson then goes into explaining character strokes. The rest of the lessons teach six types of character components and are grouped according to theme, such as body parts and actions.

The “Practice” section also includes drills. You can practice difficult words and click “native speaker videos.” The videos option curates exercises for you based on your difficult words and uses HelloChinese’s huge library of native-speaker videos to complement them.

The “Game Center” is the last section of “Practice.” It includes two games: Matching and Word Recognition.

Progress Tracking

The final section, which is called “Me,” shows your account name (if you signed up) and your daily goal progress. It also displays the total amount of time you’ve used the app.

The notification bell at the top of the app is essentially an ad system where users will receive messages promoting new feature releases or updates.

How Much Does a HelloChinese Subscription Cost?

There are two premium options: Premium and Premium+.

The Premium subscription has three options: $11.99 per month, $25.99 for three months and $69.99 for one year. It comes with unlimited access to the main course, all of the Teacher Talk lessons, all native speaker videos and all the training games.

The Premium+ subscription also has three payment options: $19.99 per month, $89.99 for six months and $149.99 for one year. You get access to everything in the Premium subscription plus unlimited access to all the graded stories, the Chinese Characters course, all immersion lessons and the Premium+ customer support.

The Pros of HelloChinese

Speaking, Pronunciation and Listening Skills

When starting out, you get to learn the basics about what pinyin and Hanzi are, how tones work and the bottom basics of Mandarin overall. Each lesson section is pretty short—I got through different sections fairly quickly.

You’ll pick up Chinese speaking and listening skills through interactive lessons on the lesson map. Pronunciation in the audio clips is fairly good, as is the voice recognition for lesson quizzes that assess your accent. I deliberately mispronounced various words in the quizzes, and the app caught all of them easily.

Diverse Content

The exercises for new modules as well as reviews have a bit of variety, so I never really got bored with them. Even the reviews included a variety of exercises, testing both vocabulary and grammar.

On top of this, you get exposure to how native speakers speak through more than 2,000 short videos. The stories are also interesting to read, and you’ll pick up fun cultural tidbits.

The Cons of HelloChinese

Writing Skills

Unfortunately, I didn’t get much writing practice while using HelloChinese. While the app does have you do writing exercises when learning new vocabulary, these mainly involve tracing shapes, and they aren’t really reviewed afterward so you’ll pretty much forget them.

So much of written Chinese involves pattern and character radicals, and you don’t get much of those details through this language learning software.

The app also doesn’t teach you how to type in Chinese.

To develop writing skills, I recommend supplementing HelloChinese with a handwriting app, such as Skritter (iOS/Android), Google Translate (iOS/Android) or Chinese Handwriting Keyboard (Android).

Not Suited for Intermediate or Advanced Learners

It’s clear that this app isn’t designed for advanced learners. You’ll probably learn around 1,000 words, which still only brings you to the lower intermediate level.

Another point where this applies is grammar.

HelloChinese does take the time to explain certain grammar concepts, but there’s very little information available on complex ones.

Beginner learners get a pretty clear and concise explanation of different basic grammar concepts early on. It just doesn’t go anywhere after the first few lessons, and the focus starts to shift primarily to listening and reading.

The Immersion Videos Are Short and Not Very Authentic

One of the drawbacks of some Chinese learning apps is that it lacks exposure to the real Chinese language as it’s spoken by native speakers. The “Immerse” feature is supposed to be HelloChinese’s answer to this problem.

While this is great for getting some exposure to the Chinese language in “immersive” settings, this doesn’t quite solve the problem. Namely, while there are a couple of free lessons, most of the videos in “Immerse” are behind a paywall and only Premium+ users get access to the full library.

Next, it appears that paying for the “Immerse” videos may not even be worth it: The videos themselves seem inauthentic and staged, and from what we can see from the free lessons, many of the clips are less than 30 seconds long.

Alternatives to HelloChinese

Duolingo

Duolingo offers Chinese as one of its many language courses.

Like HelloChinese, you unlock each lesson one at a time by completing the ones before it. You start with the basics and are introduced to characters and pinyin as you go, and learn through gamified exercises like matching, translating and fill-in-the-blank drills.

You can access the entire Duolingo Chinese course completely for free, although there’s an option to upgrade for more features. And similar to HelloChinese, Duolingo also has a pinyin-focused “mini course.”

FluentU

FluentU uses authentic videos to immerse you in Mandarin Chinese, and supplementary learning tools—like spaced repetition flashcards and quizzes—to reinforce what you’ve picked up from the content.

FluentU’s video library is huge, with videos for all levels, even absolute beginners. The videos are actual videos native speakers would watch, pulled from sources like YouTube. So you’ll find music videos, movie trailers, scenes from TV shows, commercials, inspiring talks and much more.

Each video comes with interactive subtitles, meaning you can tap on words you don’t know to see their meanings, example sentences and pronunciation. This also adds them to your personalized flashcard deck, which uses a spaced repetition algorithm to trigger your reviews at intervals optimal for long-term memory retention.

LingoDeer

LingoDeer is well-known for its Asian language courses, including Mandarin Chinese. There are two Chinese courses: Chinese I and Chinese II, so it’ll take you a bit further than HelloChinese or Duolingo.

You learn new vocabulary with picture-matching exercises, and each lesson takes you through a series of translation, listening and matching drills.

There’s also a “Stories” feature that you can start using from the very beginner stages. The stories feature high-quality native speaker audio, Chinese characters and pinyin.

Final Conclusion: Should You Use HelloChinese?

If you’re a beginner wanting to learn Chinese, I recommend downloading HelloChinese and using at least the free version.

But if you want to get the most out of your efforts, you need to supplement it with other resources and an additional Chinese study plan. This is due to drawbacks like the limited writing practice and lack of true, authentic immersion material.

For more apps to supplement HelloChinese, you can check out this list:

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)