Top 5 mobile apps to learn Chinese

Nowadays, we all use our cell phones to perform various tasks, and why not use it to practice a second language of our interest? There are many great language learning apps out there, but not all of them help you learn Mandarin Chinese. Learning a language is a great way to engage your brain, connect with new people and learn about other cultures. Many of us have heard of the acclaimed Duolingo app but is this really a good app for learning Chinese? In this article we introduce you to the best apps to learn to read and write Mandarin Chinese for FREE. 1. HelloChinese HelloChinese puede ser la mejor aplicación para empezar a aprender chino mandarín. Al igual que muchas de las aplicaciones de esta lista, puedes ir subiendo de nivel, ampliando tus conocimientos y mejorando tu comprensión del idioma a medida que avanzas. HelloChinese comienza con una explicación de cómo leer pinyin, la forma escrita del mandarín que utiliza letras en lugar de caracteres chinos. A partir de ahí, juega a juegos premiados para ampliar tu vocabulario, aprender las reglas gramaticales y construir frases. 2. LingoDeer LingoDeer is an excellent choice if you want to learn to speak, read and write Chinese. This well-structured app uses minimal English to get you thinking in Mandarin Chinese as quickly as possible. Practice writing Chinese characters, expand your vocabulary from beginner to conversational, and listen to native speakers in slow motion to help perfect your pronunciation. LingoDeer also gives you a breakdown of your performance after each lesson. This makes it easy to see your progress and highlight any weaknesses, which you can work on using the review mode. 3. HSK Online The Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK) is a standardized test used to measure your proficiency in Chinese. It consists of several levels, with increasingly extensive vocabularies ranging from the basics at HSK 1 to fluency at HSK 6. Many of the other apps on this list copy from the HSK vocabulary list to decide what to teach. So why not get that information from the source itself? You may need to know some basics to get started, but the HSK Online app offers curated lesson plans to improve your listening, reading and writing skills. Work through the HSK levels from the beginning, or test yourself to see what level you’re already at. 4. Memrise Once upon a time, Memrise was a flashcard-based application, but today you can use it to follow a gamified learning program. One of the advantages of Memrise is that it periodically encourages you to review what you’ve already learned, which helps you move those words into your long-term memory. Memrise is packed with clips of native speakers so you can improve your listening skills while learning to pronounce words and phrases clearly. You can also use your device’s camera to get translations of objects around you, helping you bridge the gap between Memrise and the real world. 5. Skritter Chinese Learning to read and write Chinese characters is incredibly important on your trip. First, the same characters are used in Mandarin and Cantonese, so knowing them increases the number of people you can communicate with. Secondly, reading or writing Chinese is very useful if you encounter someone with a regional dialect that you can’t understand. Skritter is the best app available for learning to write Chinese. It teaches you over 10,000 characters, which combine to form over 400,000 words. And Skritter guides your hand through writing these characters stroke by stroke. If you don’t want to pay anything, you’re limited to a seven-day free trial. But that’s plenty of time to get some basic characters. It’s not all about the phone… One of the best ways to consolidate your learning is to immerse yourself completely in the new language. If you want to learn Mandarin Chinese online, we recommend you to enroll in Mandarin Centers Institute courses, this center has native and Spanish-speaking teachers who will help you master this ancient language. You can also use these mobile applications to reinforce the knowledge acquired in class. If you already feel you have a basic knowledge of Mandarin Chinese, take the FREE placement test offered by Mandarin Centers Institute and don’t start from scratch.