Top 5 best apps to learn mandarin

Learning a language is a great way to engage your brain, connect with new people, and find out about different cultures.

Chinese is a notoriously difficult language to learn. This is in part because it uses complicated written characters and tones that sound strange to a Western ear. Fortunately, the web offers you many specialized apps to help you out. Here we our top 5 best apps to learn mandarin.

1. Skritter

Skritter is the app the best teach you how to write in Chinese. It’s available for Apple and Android devices.

Some of the noteworthy features of Skritter are:

• SRS flash card system
• Writing tests directly on the touchscreen
• Thousands of vocabulary lists
• The possibility of creating your own vocabulary lists
• Graphic and mnemotechnic representations to help you remember characters
• Traditional and simplified characters
• Video lessons to introduce new vocabulary
• Animations of the order of the strokes for writing each character
• Detailed statistics on your progress
• Audios of characters
• Tests on tones and the meaning of words

After trial period, you’ll be asked to choose a monthly subscription.

2. HelloChinese

HelloChinese might be one of the best apps to learn Mandarin Chinese. As many apps out there, you’ll work up through different levels, building on your knowledge and improving your understanding of the language as you go.

HelloChinese starts with an explanation of how to read pinyin. From there, play award-winning games to expand your vocabulary, learn grammatical rules, and construct sentences.

3. Chinese pod

ChinesePod is one of the most prestigious and oldest platforms for learning Chinese. Its system is based on high-quality podcasts although the platform is much more than just that.

The app offers all of the services of the platform, which includes videos and podcasts organized by levels as well as supporting materials such as review exercises for lessons and flashcards with personalized vocabulary lists. The big advantage of the app is that you can download all of the content so that you can use the app even without an Internet connection.

4. Memrise

At the beginning Memrise was a flashcard-based app, but these days you can use it to follow a gamified learning syllabus instead. It periodically encourages you to review what you’ve already learned, helping shift those words to your long-term memory.

Memrise is packed with clips of native speakers so you can improve your listening skills while learning how to pronounce words and phrases clearly.

5. Anki

Anki is the most popular software to study using flashcards. It let you add Chinese decks to your account so you can work through vast vocabularies and expand your knowledge. Decks of flashcards can include audio and images to aid you in memorizing new words. You can then sync your decks over the cloud, making it easy to review them on any device.