The best way to learn Chinese, compared honestly
There is no single best way, and a page that names one is usually selling it. Every plan that works contains the same five things — tones learned properly at the start, one dictionary, a core vocabulary kept alive by review, a lot of input slightly above your level, and someone who corrects you. No app covers all five. Below: 17 methods and tools with what each one is missing — ours included — and a picker that turns your goal, time and budget into a plan.
The five jobs, and who does them
Comparison pages in this niche mostly rank apps against each other, which hides the actual problem: the apps are not doing the same job. Sort them by job and the choices get much easier, because most categories have one obvious answer and you only have to make the decision once.
- Sequencing — what to learn, in what order. This is what a paid course actually sells. Free substitute: a fixed syllabus like the HSK level lists or a learning path.
- Lookup — a dictionary you can reach in two seconds, including for characters you cannot type. Well solved, free.
- Retention — spaced review, so the words you learned in March are still there in June. Well solved, free.
- Input — reading and listening slightly above your level, in volume. Partly solved free; paid libraries buy you depth rather than quality.
- Correction — someone telling you your third tone is wrong. The one job with no good free substitute, and the reason tutoring is the only thing on this page we would tell most people to pay for.
Everything below is organised around those five. If you only take one thing from this page, take the fifth one: pronunciation errors set hard, and every month you go uncorrected is a month of practice you will later have to undo.
Build me a plan
Four questions. The plan below rewrites itself as you answer them — nothing is sent anywhere, and every step that this site can do for you links to the free page rather than to an app.
12 steps in your plan. Answers stay in this browser and are not saved, sent or added to the address bar.
Your Chinese study plan
Hold a conversation · 2 to 4 hours a week · Nothing — free only · On my phone, in gaps
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Learn pinyin and the four tones before you learn a single character
Pinyin is not a beginner's crutch you throw away later — it is how you will type Chinese for the rest of your life, and it is the only thing standing between you and learning every new word with the wrong tone. Two weeks here saves a year of re-learning words you already "know".
Your first week or two, then never again from scratch.
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Drill tone pairs, not single tones
Almost nobody has trouble with a tone said on its own. Real words are two syllables, the tones change each other, and the third tone in particular is not the shape the textbook draws when it has a neighbour. Drill the pairs and the single tones come free.
Five minutes most days, for about a month.
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Then hear yourself, because you cannot hear yourself while you speak
Recognising a second tone and producing one are separate skills, and every tone exercise on the internet trains the first. You need something that shows you what your own pitch actually did — the gap between what you think you said and what came out is the whole problem.
Two minutes at the end of a session.
In-app pronunciation scoring Free tier + paidGood at: Patience. You can say the same syllable thirty times and nothing sighs, which is worth more at the start than it sounds.Missing: Almost all of it is speech recognition underneath, and speech recognition answers "were you understood?", not "was your tone right?". A recogniser will accept a flat third tone in a word it can guess from the sentence, and mark you correct. -
Pick one dictionary and use it for everything
You will look up thousands of words. Two seconds of friction per lookup is the difference between checking a word and guessing at it, and guessing is how wrong meanings get memorised. Whichever you pick, learn its handwriting and camera input — you will meet characters you cannot type long before you can write them.
Every time you are unsure. That is the habit.
Free here Free Chinese dictionary with stroke order, audio and examples · Pinyin annotator — paste a passage, get the reading of every word · Draw a character you cannot typePleco Free tier + paidGood at: Being the reference nearly every serious learner ends up with: fast, offline, and able to take a character in by handwriting, camera or clipboard when you cannot type it.Missing: It is a dictionary, not a course. It will answer any question you already know how to ask, and teach you nothing you do not think to look up. -
Get a first 150 words before you try to say anything complicated
Grammar is the easy part of Mandarin — no conjugation, no plurals, no gender, no tenses in the European sense. What stops you is not knowing the words. The HSK 1 list is 150 of them and it is free, ordered, and used by every course and exam you might meet later.
Ten new words a day for a fortnight, then stop adding and review.
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Review on a schedule instead of re-reading
Re-reading a word list feels like studying and does almost nothing. Being asked a word you are on the edge of forgetting is what moves it. Any spaced-repetition tool will do this; the only one that works is the one you actually open, so pick the one with the least setup between you and the first review.
Ten minutes daily, before you learn anything new.
Anki FreeGood at: Remembering things on your behalf. The scheduler is the best there is, it is free, and there is a shared Chinese deck for essentially every textbook and HSK level.Missing: It teaches nothing and it assumes you will build or vet your own cards. The setup defeats a lot of people well before the reviews start paying them back. -
Under two hours a week: do one thing, daily, and let everything else go
At this budget a broad plan is a plan you will abandon. Pick the single daily habit — one word, one review session — and protect it. Two hours a week done every week beats six hours a week done for a month, and the people who get somewhere on very little time are the ones who chose what to drop.
Five to ten minutes, every day, same time.
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Two to four hours a week: two short sessions and one longer one
Split it. Two ten-minute review sessions keep the words alive; one longer weekly session is where you actually learn something new. Doing it the other way round — one big Sunday session — is how people find they have forgotten last week's words every single week.
Ten minutes twice in the week, an hour at the weekend.
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Five to nine hours a week: split the week by skill, not by day
At this point you have enough time to be bad at four things at once. Give each of listening, reading, speaking and characters its own slot rather than doing whatever you feel like — otherwise you will do the one you are best at, which is the one that needs it least.
Four or five sessions, each with one job.
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Ten hours a week or more: your bottleneck is input, not study
Above about ten hours, more drilling stops paying. What is short is hours spent with Chinese you nearly understand — listening and reading slightly above your level, in volume, without stopping to look up every word. That is the part that turns a vocabulary into a language.
Keep the drills, add an hour a day of input you do not fully follow.
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If you are going to pay for one thing, pay for the order to do things in
What a course app actually sells is sequencing — what to learn, in what order, and when to come back to it. That is genuinely hard to do for yourself and it is the one job free tools do worst. It is also the purchase with the shortest useful life: most people outgrow the beginner course inside a year, so buy a year, not a lifetime.
The first six to twelve months.
HelloChinese Free tier + paidGood at: Being an actual course. It introduces tones and characters from the first lessons instead of postponing them, and it decides the order for you — which is the single thing a beginner cannot do for themselves.Missing: It thins out well before you run out of language: past the intermediate levels there is much less here, and learners routinely finish it and find themselves with no obvious next step.Duolingo Free tier + paidGood at: Getting you to turn up. The streak and the five-minute lesson are the best habit mechanic anyone has built for language study, and the Chinese course costs nothing.Missing: Tones and speaking. That is the most repeated criticism of its Chinese course in the 2026 review round-ups, and characters arrive as shapes to recognise rather than as things you can build or write. -
Spending nothing? Then the sequence is the thing you have to supply yourself
Everything a paid course does can be had free except the ordering, so take the ordering from somewhere fixed and stop redesigning it. A learning path or an HSK level list gives you a syllabus that does not move — and a syllabus you did not choose is much harder to argue with at 9pm.
Decide once. Re-deciding weekly is the actual failure mode.
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Travel: learn the forty phrases you will actually use, and skip the rest
A trip does not need a language, it needs about forty sentences and the confidence to say them badly. Learn them as whole phrases with the tones attached rather than as words to assemble — you will not have time to assemble anything at a ticket counter.
Two or three weeks before you fly.
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Travel: rehearse the two exchanges that actually go wrong
Ordering food and paying for things. Everything else on a trip can be done by pointing; those two involve someone replying to you at speed, in a noisy room, with a queue behind you. Practise hearing the reply, not just saying your line.
Ten minutes a day in the fortnight before you go.
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Travel: carry your destination written down in Chinese
The single highest-value piece of preparation, and it takes two minutes. A taxi driver who cannot read pinyin can read a printed address, and a hotel card in your pocket solves the one problem that is genuinely stressful to solve in a language you do not speak.
Once, before you leave. Print two copies.
Free here Make a printable Chinese address card -
Conversation: say things out loud from the first week
Reading Chinese silently builds a private pronunciation that nobody else shares, and the longer you leave it the more there is to undo. Say every word you learn, out loud, badly, from the beginning. It is also the only way to find out that your third tone is not doing what you think it is.
Out loud every session. Never silent.
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Get a person to correct you — this is what the money is for
Everything else on this page can be done free. This cannot, and it is the one thing that reliably separates people who become able to speak from people who become able to read about speaking. An hour a week with someone who interrupts you is worth more than ten hours of app streaks. Bring a plan: given none, most tutors default to free conversation, which is worth a lot at intermediate level and very little at week three.
One hour a week, with something specific to work on.
italki Per lessonGood at: Choice, and price. It is the widest pool of Chinese tutors anywhere and the cheapest reliable way to have a real person correct your tones every week.Missing: You bring the syllabus. Given no plan, most tutors default to free conversation — which is worth a great deal at intermediate level and very little in week three.Preply Per lessonGood at: Structure around the lesson. Tutors are pushed to run a plan, and the matching questionnaire does more of the choosing for you than italki's browse-and-guess.Missing: The package pricing and trial rules make it more expensive to shop around, so a bad match costs more here than it does elsewhere.A taught class (college or evening course) Per lessonGood at: Pacing you cannot quietly skip, a cohort who are as bad at it as you are, and someone who notices what you get wrong before it becomes permanent.Missing: It moves at the median student's speed, which is wrong for almost everyone in the room, and the schedule is not yours. -
No tutor in the budget? Record yourself, and find an exchange partner
The two things a tutor gives you are correction and an obligation. You can approximate the first by recording a sentence and comparing your pitch against the model — the gap is usually obvious once you can see it — and the second by arranging to speak to another learner or a language-exchange partner at a fixed time each week. Neither is as good. Both are much better than waiting until you can afford a tutor. What will not do it is an AI assistant: it cannot hear you, so it cannot tell you the one thing you need to know.
Record weekly; arrange a fixed slot with someone.
Language exchange apps (HelloTalk, Tandem) Free tier + paidGood at: Putting a real person on the other end for nothing. You get Chinese aimed at you rather than at a class, a reason to turn up at a fixed time, and the experience of actually being understood — which no drill on this page can simulate.Missing: Your partner is a native speaker, not a teacher. The correction is reciprocal, untrained and unreliable: they will work out what you meant from context and have no idea why your third tone was wrong. Roughly half of every session is you teaching English, and finding someone who turns up a second time is a social problem rather than a language one.AI assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) Free tier + paidGood at: Explaining, on demand, in answer to the question you actually asked. Ask why a sentence ends the way it does and you get a reply pitched at your confusion rather than at a syllabus — and it will write practice sentences at your level, on any topic, for as long as you keep asking.Missing: It cannot hear you, so on the one job this page calls unsolved it does not compete at all. It also produces confident wrong tone marks, wrong stroke counts and characters that are not the word you asked about, and a beginner has no way to tell those answers from the good ones — the wrong ones look exactly the same. And it agrees with you: tell it your sentence is right and it will usually concur, which is the opposite of being corrected. -
Exam: work the official list for your level, in the official order
The HSK lists are published, finite and free, and the exam is drawn from them. This is the one goal on this page where the syllabus is not a judgement call — you do not need to decide what to learn, only to get through a known list. Treat anything outside the list as optional until the list is done.
A fixed number of words a day, counted backwards from the exam date.
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Exam: sit a timed mock long before you feel ready
The thing that fails people is not vocabulary, it is the clock and the listening section. Take a full timed paper early enough that the result is still useful — a bad mock twelve weeks out is information, and a bad mock the week before is just bad news.
One timed paper a month, then weekly in the last month.
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Exam: a textbook is the one purchase that reliably pays for itself here
Exam preparation is the case where paper wins. The standard series follows the word lists level for level, the drills are built for the question types you will meet, and nothing in it interrupts you. This is also the only row on this page where the free alternative is genuinely thinner: our lists give you the words, not the graded exercises.
One chapter a week, workbook included.
HSK Standard Course (textbook series) One-off purchaseGood at: A syllabus that follows the exam word lists level for level, with drills and audio, and no notifications in it.Missing: Nothing in it checks anything. Your tones, your handwriting and your answers are marked only by the key in the back, and it will not tell you that you are saying it wrong. -
Reading: read at a level where you are not looking up every line
If you stop for a dictionary more than about once a sentence you are decoding, not reading, and decoding does not build reading speed. Drop a level until it is nearly comfortable, read a lot of it, and move up when it becomes boring. Boring is the signal you are looking for.
Fifteen minutes a day beats two hours at the weekend.
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Reading: paid graded libraries are worth it once you have run out of free material
The free graded material on any one site is finite, and reading volume is the whole point. A subscription buys you a library deep enough that you never have to hunt for the next thing at your level — which is the thing that actually stops people reading.
When you have read everything free at your level.
Du Chinese Free tier + paidGood at: The shortest path from "I know some words" to "I can read": graded stories with native audio, tap-to-define and a pinyin toggle you can turn off as you improve.Missing: Reading and listening only, and the free tier is a sample rather than a course. You still need something that makes you produce language.The Chairman's Bao SubscriptionGood at: Graded news, so the vocabulary is what people are actually reading this month rather than textbook Chinese from a decade ago.Missing: One register — news — and it only starts being useful around HSK 3. Below that there is not much here for you. -
Look up what you cannot type by drawing it
The gap that stops most reading sessions is a character you can see and cannot type. Drawing it is faster than counting strokes and radicals, and it works when you have no idea what the reading is — which is exactly when you need the dictionary most.
Whenever it happens.
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Characters: learn components, not strokes
There are only a couple of hundred recurring parts, and almost every character is two or three of them. Learn the parts and a new character is a short description you can hold in your head; learn characters as stroke sequences and every one of the several thousand is a fresh act of memory.
A handful of components a week, alongside your words.
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Characters: write them by hand, on paper, even in 2026
You will type Chinese by pinyin and you will almost never need to write it out. Write anyway: handwriting is what makes the difference between characters you recognise and characters you can recall, and recognition alone collapses as soon as two characters look similar — which, at a few thousand characters, is all of them.
Ten minutes, three times a week. Quality over quantity.
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Characters: if you want stroke-level correction, that is the one thing worth paying for
Free tools will animate a character and let you trace it. What they will not do is watch you write it from memory and tell you which stroke went wrong, which is the feedback that stops bad stroke order becoming permanent. That is a narrow benefit for a subscription — worth it if handwriting is your actual goal, not otherwise.
Daily, in short sessions, while it is still new.
Skritter SubscriptionGood at: Handwriting drilled with real stroke-order checking — it tells you which stroke you got wrong, rather than just that the character was.Missing: It is narrow on purpose. It assumes you already have a word list and a course to hang it on, and it is the most expensive way on this page to learn one skill. -
On paper: print the week on Sunday, then close the laptop
Studying away from a screen is a real advantage — no notifications, no tab with the answer in it — but it needs ten minutes of setup. Print the week's word list, some grid paper and a set of cut-out cards in one go, and the rest of the week needs no device at all.
One printing session a week.
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On a phone: two icons on the home screen, and nothing else
Phone study lives or dies on friction. Put the dictionary and one deck where your thumb already goes, and delete everything else you installed in the first fortnight. Gaps — a queue, a bus, a kettle — are worth more than they look, but only if opening the thing takes no decision.
Whenever you would otherwise scroll.
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At a computer: spend the sitting-down time on what a phone is bad at
A desk session is for the things that need a big screen and a keyboard: reading a whole passage with the reading annotated, typing Chinese properly, comparing sentences. Do not spend it flipping flashcards — that is exactly what the phone is for, and it is the commonest way a study hour disappears.
One or two longer sessions a week.
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Whatever else you change, do not break the chain
Every plan on this page is worth less than the plan you keep. Mandarin takes the US Foreign Service Institute about 2,200 class hours to teach to professional level — roughly four times Spanish — and no arrangement of apps changes that arithmetic. What changes it is showing up on the days you do not feel like it.
Daily. Even a bad five minutes counts.
Nothing matched that combination, which is a bug on our side rather than a verdict on your plan. Try the learning paths in the meantime.
© 2026 ThePureLanguage · thepurelanguage.com/compare
Free to print and use at home or in the classroom. Please don't resell it or republish it as your own.
17 ways to learn Chinese, compared
Last checked 22 August 2026Grouped by the job it does, not ranked — a dictionary and a tutor are not competitors. Every row says what it is missing, including ours. Costs are given as a shape rather than a figure on purpose: prices change between one visit and the next, and a stale number on a page whose whole value is being trustworthy is worse than no number at all.
| Tool or method | Good at | What it is missing | Free here instead |
|---|---|---|---|
| Structured courses | |||
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HelloChinese
Free tier + paid
The early lessons are free; the rest of the course and the review tools sit behind a subscription.
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Being an actual course. It introduces tones and characters from the first lessons instead of postponing them, and it decides the order for you — which is the single thing a beginner cannot do for themselves.
Use it if: You are starting from nothing and want someone else to choose what comes next.
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It thins out well before you run out of language: past the intermediate levels there is much less here, and learners routinely finish it and find themselves with no obvious next step. |
Closest here
The order, and where in it you start. A placement quiz puts you at a level, five guided paths name the next page every single time rather than leaving you on a hub, and the official HSK lists give you a syllabus somebody else already sequenced.
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Duolingo
Free tier + paid
Free with ads; the paid tier removes them and lifts practice limits rather than adding course content.
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Getting you to turn up. The streak and the five-minute lesson are the best habit mechanic anyone has built for language study, and the Chinese course costs nothing.
Use it if: Your problem is consistency rather than material — and you pair it with something that drills tones.
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Tones and speaking. That is the most repeated criticism of its Chinese course in the 2026 review round-ups, and characters arrive as shapes to recognise rather than as things you can build or write. |
Closest here
One page a day — today's word with audio, a five-question quiz, the Wordle and whatever your review deck says is due — and it keeps the streak, the XP and the daily goal ring while you do it.
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| Dictionaries and lookup | |||
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Pleco
Free tier + paid
The dictionary itself is free. The add-ons people actually buy — extra dictionaries, camera and handwriting input, the flashcard system — are bought once and kept.
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Being the reference nearly every serious learner ends up with: fast, offline, and able to take a character in by handwriting, camera or clipboard when you cannot type it.
Use it if: You are studying Chinese at all. This is the least controversial recommendation on the page.
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It is a dictionary, not a course. It will answer any question you already know how to ask, and teach you nothing you do not think to look up. | our free Chinese dictionary — stroke order, audio and example sentences |
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ThePureLanguage (this site)
That's us
Free
Free, with no account, no sign-up and nothing behind a paywall. It is paid for by the ads on the page.
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Lookup and drills in a browser with nothing in the way: word-by-word translation on three lines, a dictionary, tone practice that listens to you, graded readers, a sentence bank and printable worksheets.
Use it if: You want the reference and practice half without paying for it — and you get the sequencing from a course, a textbook or a teacher.
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There is no course here. Nothing sequences your learning for you, nothing schedules long-term review across the whole site, and nobody corrects your speaking. For those three you need one of the rows above, or a person. | This is the free one. |
| Flashcards and spaced repetition | |||
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Anki
Free
Free on desktop, Android and the web. The iPhone app is a one-off purchase, and it is what funds the project.
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Remembering things on your behalf. The scheduler is the best there is, it is free, and there is a shared Chinese deck for essentially every textbook and HSK level.
Use it if: You are past the first few hundred words and you have started forgetting them faster than you learn them.
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It teaches nothing and it assumes you will build or vet your own cards. The setup defeats a lot of people well before the reviews start paying them back. | our free review deck, with nothing to install |
| Pronunciation and speaking | |||
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In-app pronunciation scoring
Free tier + paid
Not sold on its own — it comes bundled with whichever course app you are already using.
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Patience. You can say the same syllable thirty times and nothing sighs, which is worth more at the start than it sounds.
Use it if: You want low-stakes reps — but check the tones themselves against something that measures pitch rather than words.
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Almost all of it is speech recognition underneath, and speech recognition answers "were you understood?", not "was your tone right?". A recogniser will accept a flat third tone in a word it can guess from the sentence, and mark you correct. | our free tone mirror, which draws your pitch instead of guessing your words |
| Reading and listening input | |||
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Du Chinese
Free tier + paid
A few lessons are free and refreshed each week; the library behind them is a subscription.
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The shortest path from "I know some words" to "I can read": graded stories with native audio, tap-to-define and a pinyin toggle you can turn off as you improve.
Use it if: You have around 300 words and reading real sentences still feels impossible.
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Reading and listening only, and the free tier is a sample rather than a course. You still need something that makes you produce language. | our 41 free graded readers with ruby pinyin and tap-to-define |
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The Chairman's Bao
Subscription
Subscription. Some articles are readable without one, but the graded library is the product.
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Graded news, so the vocabulary is what people are actually reading this month rather than textbook Chinese from a decade ago.
Use it if: You are intermediate, bored of textbook dialogues, and want reading that is about something.
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One register — news — and it only starts being useful around HSK 3. Below that there is not much here for you. | our free sentence bank — 3,329 sentences searchable by hanzi, pinyin or English |
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Graded podcasts and comprehensible-input video
Free tier + paid
Most of it is free on YouTube and in podcast apps; a few of the better-known series sell transcripts or a members' feed.
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Volume. Hours of listening pitched just above what you can already follow is the input nearly every self-study plan is short of, and it is the cheapest thing on this page.
Use it if: You have time you cannot spend at a desk — a commute, a walk, washing up.
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It is entirely passive unless you make it otherwise. Understanding a sentence when you hear it is a long way from producing one, and nothing here makes you retrieve anything. | our free text reader — paste any Chinese and have it read aloud at your own speed |
| Handwriting and characters | |||
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Skritter
Subscription
Monthly or yearly, with a trial. There is no useful free tier.
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Handwriting drilled with real stroke-order checking — it tells you which stroke you got wrong, rather than just that the character was.
Use it if: You have decided you want to write by hand and you keep fossilising the wrong stroke order.
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It is narrow on purpose. It assumes you already have a word list and a course to hang it on, and it is the most expensive way on this page to learn one skill. | our free printable 田字格 practice sheets |
| AI assistants | |||
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AI assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini)
Free tier + paid
All of them have a free tier that is enough for language questions; the paid tiers buy longer conversations, better models and voice modes rather than anything Chinese-specific.
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Explaining, on demand, in answer to the question you actually asked. Ask why a sentence ends the way it does and you get a reply pitched at your confusion rather than at a syllabus — and it will write practice sentences at your level, on any topic, for as long as you keep asking.
Use it if: You have a specific question about something you have already met — and you check anything it says about tones, characters or stroke order against a dictionary before you learn it.
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It cannot hear you, so on the one job this page calls unsolved it does not compete at all. It also produces confident wrong tone marks, wrong stroke counts and characters that are not the word you asked about, and a beginner has no way to tell those answers from the good ones — the wrong ones look exactly the same. And it agrees with you: tell it your sentence is right and it will usually concur, which is the opposite of being corrected. |
Closest here
The lookup half of the same question, out of a dictionary rather than out of a model. Paste a sentence and every word comes back with its pinyin, its meaning and its characters broken apart; the annotator puts pinyin above any text you give it, the analyser tells you which HSK level each word sits at, and 25 grammar points are written out with examples and a drill.
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| People who correct you | |||
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italki
Per lesson
Pay per lesson at each tutor's own rate; community tutors cost noticeably less than qualified teachers.
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Choice, and price. It is the widest pool of Chinese tutors anywhere and the cheapest reliable way to have a real person correct your tones every week.
Use it if: You can say things, and you have no idea whether you are saying them correctly.
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You bring the syllabus. Given no plan, most tutors default to free conversation — which is worth a great deal at intermediate level and very little in week three. |
Closest here
The syllabus this row says you have to bring, plus the feedback that does not need a person: the tone mirror records a syllable and draws the pitch of your own voice against the shape you were aiming for, which is the one correction a machine can actually give you.
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Preply
Per lesson
Pay per lesson, normally bought as a package of hours rather than one at a time.
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Structure around the lesson. Tutors are pushed to run a plan, and the matching questionnaire does more of the choosing for you than italki's browse-and-guess.
Use it if: You want a tutor but do not want to interview four of them first.
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The package pricing and trial rules make it more expensive to shop around, so a bad match costs more here than it does elsewhere. |
Closest here
Everything a first lesson otherwise burns paid minutes establishing. Sit the placement quiz and the vocabulary test before you book, and the tutor starts from what you know instead of finding it out at their hourly rate — with the word list for the level agreed rather than guessed.
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A taught class (college or evening course)
Per lesson
A course fee per term, and it is usually the largest single amount on this page.
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Pacing you cannot quietly skip, a cohort who are as bad at it as you are, and someone who notices what you get wrong before it becomes permanent.
Use it if: You have tried self-study twice and stopped twice.
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It moves at the median student's speed, which is wrong for almost everyone in the room, and the schedule is not yours. |
Closest here
The pacing, without the room. A guided path fixes the order so no session starts with deciding what to do, and the daily page fixes the cadence — one word, one quiz, whatever is due — with a streak and a goal ring that make a skipped day visible.
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Language exchange apps (HelloTalk, Tandem)
Free tier + paid
Free to use and to message. The paid tiers buy translation credits, correction tools and the removal of ads — not access to people.
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Putting a real person on the other end for nothing. You get Chinese aimed at you rather than at a class, a reason to turn up at a fixed time, and the experience of actually being understood — which no drill on this page can simulate.
Use it if: You can already produce sentences, there is no budget for a tutor, and what you are short of is someone to use them on.
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Your partner is a native speaker, not a teacher. The correction is reciprocal, untrained and unreliable: they will work out what you meant from context and have no idea why your third tone was wrong. Roughly half of every session is you teaching English, and finding someone who turns up a second time is a social problem rather than a language one. |
Closest here
Somewhere to say it out loud before you say it to a stranger. Two roleplay games put you in the exchange and answer back — an immigration officer you reply to out loud through your browser's microphone, and a market stallholder whose price moves depending on what you choose to say — plus word-level pronunciation scoring and, for whole sentences, the HSKK speaking practice.
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| Paper | |||
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HSK Standard Course (textbook series)
One-off purchase
Bought once per level — textbook plus workbook, with audio you download.
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A syllabus that follows the exam word lists level for level, with drills and audio, and no notifications in it.
Use it if: You are sitting an HSK exam, or you want a fixed order to work through offline.
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Nothing in it checks anything. Your tones, your handwriting and your answers are marked only by the key in the back, and it will not tell you that you are saying it wrong. | our free HSK word lists, mock tests and downloadable PDFs |
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A squared notebook and a pen
One-off purchase
Cheap, and it lasts months. A 田字格 notebook is ruled into the grid Chinese children learn to write in.
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Making characters stick. Writing by hand recruits far more than recognition does, and nothing on a screen reproduces getting the proportions wrong and being able to see it.
Use it if: You want to read characters reliably. Writing them is still the fastest way there.
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No feedback whatsoever. Nothing tells you a stroke order is wrong, and by the time you notice it is a habit. | our free printable 田字格 sheets and worksheet generators |
How this page is written, and how it is paid for
This site is free and runs on the ads you can see on this page. Two of the rows above — the tutor marketplaces — are services we may eventually have an affiliate arrangement with, and where that is live the link says so and a disclosure appears at the top of this page. Everything else here is unpaid, and none of it is an advertisement.
The rules this page is held to, because a comparison page is worth nothing without them:
- Every row has to say what it is missing. That is a required field in the data, not a house style — a row that cannot fill it fails the build. Ours says there is no course here, nothing sequences your learning, and nobody corrects your speaking, because all three are true.
- Nothing is ranked by what it pays. A plan step in the picker has no partner, price or
commission field at all, so the advice physically cannot vary with a commercial arrangement. The only
thing an affiliate link changes anywhere on this page is its
relattribute and whether the disclosure above renders. - Where we can do it for free, we send you to our page, not to an app. Also a required field: any category we actually cover has to carry the free link in the last column.
- Where we cannot replace it, the last column says what we do cover. No page here replaces a course, an answer to your question, or a person who corrects you, so those rows are not headed "instead" — they say closest here, and link to the pages that come nearest.
- A plan with a "free" budget may not contain a step that costs money. Checked, not trusted.
- No prices, only shapes. See the note above the table.
Rows were last read through and checked on 22 August 2026. Something wrong or out of date? Tell us — a comparison that is not corrected is just an old opinion.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best way to learn Chinese?
There is no single best way, and a page that names one is usually selling it. What every successful plan contains is the same five things: pinyin and tones learned properly at the start, one dictionary you use for everything, a core vocabulary kept alive by spaced review, a lot of listening and reading slightly above your level, and someone who corrects you. Apps and courses differ mostly in which of those five they cover, and none of them covers all five. Pick tools per job rather than looking for one that does everything.
What is the best app to learn Chinese?
For a complete beginner who wants the order decided for them, HelloChinese is the most complete structured course on a phone — it teaches tones and characters from the start rather than postponing them. For looking things up, Pleco is the reference nearly every serious learner ends up with. For remembering what you have learned, Anki. Those are three different apps because they are three different jobs, and the honest answer to "which one app" is that the question has no good answer.
Can you learn Chinese for free?
Almost all of it, yes. Free tools cover pronunciation, tones, dictionaries, character practice, graded reading, flashcards and spaced review — everything on this page's plan except two things. The first is sequencing, which is what a paid course actually sells you, and you can substitute a fixed syllabus like the HSK level lists. The second is a human correcting your speaking, and that one has no free substitute that works as well. The closest are recording yourself to check your own tones against the model, and a language-exchange app such as HelloTalk or Tandem — which is free and does put a real person on the other end, but your partner is a native speaker rather than a teacher, the correction is reciprocal and untrained, and about half of every session is you teaching English.
Can ChatGPT teach me Chinese?
It can explain Chinese to you, which is not the same thing, and it is genuinely good at that — ask why a sentence is built the way it is and you get an answer aimed at your actual confusion, plus as many practice sentences at your level as you want. What it cannot do is the job this page calls the unsolved one: it cannot hear you, so it will never tell you your third tone is wrong. It also states wrong tone marks, wrong stroke counts and the wrong character with exactly the same confidence as the right ones, and a beginner cannot tell which is which — so check anything it says about pronunciation or characters against a dictionary. And it agrees with you, which is the opposite of correction. Use it as an explainer alongside a course, never as the teacher.
Is Duolingo enough to learn Chinese?
Not on its own. Duolingo's real strength is that it gets people to turn up, and the streak is the best habit mechanic anyone has built — but the most repeated criticism of its Chinese course is that it is thin on tones and speaking, and characters arrive as shapes to recognise rather than as things you can write. Used alongside dedicated tone practice and a dictionary it is a reasonable spine for a beginner. Used alone it produces people who have a long streak and cannot be understood.
How long does it take to learn Chinese?
The US Foreign Service Institute budgets about 2,200 class hours to take an English speaker to professional working proficiency in Mandarin — roughly four times what it budgets for Spanish or French. In practice, an hour a day gets most people to basic conversation in six to twelve months and to comfortable everyday conversation in two to three years. The grammar is genuinely easy; it is the characters, the tones and the complete absence of shared vocabulary with English that make it slow.
Do I need a Chinese tutor?
You need one eventually, and later than most people think. Nothing free reliably tells you that your third tone is wrong, and pronunciation errors set hard — so an hour a week with someone who interrupts you is worth more than ten hours of app streaks. But a tutor in week three, with no vocabulary to work with and no plan to bring, mostly becomes conversation practice you cannot yet have. Build a few hundred words first, then hire someone and arrive with something specific to fix.
Why does this comparison recommend its own site?
Because leaving ourselves out would be its own kind of dishonesty, and because for several of the jobs on this page there is a free page here that does what an app charges for — so sending you to the app instead would be worse advice. Our own row in the table carries the same "what is missing" line as every other row, and says the true thing: there is no course here, nothing sequences your learning, and nobody corrects your speaking. For those three, one of the other rows is the answer.
Start now, free
Begin with the pinyin chart and the tone pairs quiz, check your own tones in the tone pitch mirror, work the HSK 1 word list, read a graded story, and look up anything you meet in the dictionary. Or take a ready-made sequence from the learning paths.
Still deciding where to begin at all? Pinyin first or characters first? sets out what each route costs, in the same terms as the table above.