10 Apps To Help You Learn Chinese, the Most Spoken Language in the World
(Flickr: Eric Nishio)
This post comes courtesy of Fueled, a mobile design and development company based in New York and London. You can read more posts like it at the Fueled blog.
Jack Flanagan is a freelance writer for audience.io and writes for the Fueled blog.
Mandarin Chinese is the national language of China, as well as the lingua franca of Southeast Asia. There are nearly 1 billion native speakers across the globe, making it the most popularly spoken language in the world.
However, learning Chinese as an English speaker is fraught with false friends and alien concepts. For one thing, it’s a tonal language: There are four pitches a word can have, each with a different meaning. The grammar is almost entirely different from English, or any Romance/Germanic language, for that matter. And actually writing in Chinese is considered a skill for moderate to advanced students and very impressive. One needs to know about 3,000 characters to read a newspaper; the average Chinese citizen knows around 8,000.
Yet Mandarin Chinese is quickly becoming an important language to know as China becomes one of the most powerful nations in the world. So whether you’re keen to do business in China or just to travel in Southeast Asia on holiday, learning Chinese is a great New Year’s resolution. If you’re up for the challenge, here are 10 apps that will help you build a solid foundation for the first few crucial months of learning.
Our rating: 5/10
Free; in-app purchases $4.99
It looks like it’s for kids, and probably is, but it works well for those looking to memorize basic vocabulary. You receive 50 lessons with around 20 pieces of vocabulary each. You are then tested in mini-games, things like helping a frog match a word to a picture to eat it. It’s perfect for memorizing basic words and phrases in an engaging way.
Our rating: 6/10
Free; in-app purchases $4.99–$99.99
Pleco is an attractive dictionary app that many expats in China swear by. The add-ons are unbelievably expensive but unfortunately necessary. However, although the standard features are limited, the app shows you the Simplified (Mandarin) characters beside “traditional” (Cantonese, Japanese) characters, which can be helpful in different countries. We recommend the free version for English-Chinese translation.
Our rating: 8/10
Free; in-app purchases $3.99
KTdict C-E is another dictionary. The app isn’t terribly attractive, but the app is free and straightforward to use. The add-ons give you tools for training yourself, like flashcards and quizzes, but considering the range of free learning apps out there, they aren’t really worth it. But as an efficient offline dictionary, this app is very handy.
Learn Chinese (iOS and Android)
Our rating: 7/10
Free; in-app purchases $4.99
Learn Chinese is a good-looking phrasebook for practicing basic phrases. Because literal English-Chinese translation almost never works, even basic phrases can be confusing. For instance, just because you know the words for “how“ and “are” and “you” doesn’t mean you can ask someone how they are. A phrasebook is a great way to pick up these essential phrases. It also sounds out the words to help you practice.
Our rating: 7/10
$1.99
This app gives you the evolution of about 100 characters over the last few thousand years. Perfect for anyone interested in the expansive history of the Chinese written language. The app also shows the best ways to write in Chinese, by recognizing the parts or “radicals” of a character. For example: 女 (nu) means woman, and 子 (zi) means child. 好 (hao) means “good,” because it was considered a woman’s fulfilled obligation to have a child. The app makes it clear how these characters evolved.
Our rating: 6/10
Free
More useful than it is beautiful, Pinyin Chart is a must-have for beginners, although the app’s design is a bit grim. Pinyin is the romanized Chinese alphabet, or Chinese sounds written in English characters. While some letters sound the same in English, others, like c (“ts”) and y (sometimes silent) can trip you up. A good app to have in your arsenal.
Our rating: 5/10
Free; in-app purchases $0.99–$9.99
The order in which you draw a Chinese character is the trickiest part of writing; a poorly written word can be illegible, and a computer won’t understand it if you’re writing on a trackpad or a touchscreen. This app is useful for those looking to get their stroke order just right, but it isn’t very useful to learn word definitions or phrases.
Our rating:6/10
Free; in-app purchases $0.99–$5.99
Penyo Pal is another children’s game that teaches basic vocabulary. There are a huge number of games that prompt you to complete a story, which, although repetitive, does force you to learn. Penyo — meaning “friend” — Pal is great for memorizing words that you might not normally come across, like “coconut.” The add-ons give you extra “episodes” in the story.
Our rating: 7/10
Free; in-app purchases $1.99
PPTV is a dream come true for those seeking more exposure to the Mandarin language. PPTV has a huge number of movies and TV shows available online for free. There may or may not be subtitles depending on the program, so it’s mostly about getting used to sounds and practicing pronunciation. Available on iTunes and the App Store, the in-app purchases allow you to see more shows.
Our rating: 3/10
$1.99
Hanzi Warrior goes from the ground up, teaching you the pronunciations and names of even the most basic strokes. It’s something you will never need, and probably wouldn’t be taught in a mainstream class, so we wouldn’t recommend it. But, if you’re the perfectionist type, this should fulfill your burning desire to completely understand the language. The game has a storyline in which you save China but, to be honest, is indecipherable thanks to the generic design of the app.
Now that you’re armed with so many apps to learn Chinese, the question isn’t whether you’ll learn or not, but which app you will choose!
