Created: 19/03/2025 - Last updated: 30/08/2025
Here are the tools I'm using to learn Mandarin Chinese. Some of those I've tested and abandonned - at the bottom of this article is the list of the main resources and methods I've used and would recommend.
For Mandarin Chinese immersion resources, check out this article.
When I was about to start learning Chinese, I was really scared about the pronunciation - and especially about the infamous four tones. In the end, my pronunciation is far from perfect, but I found some really good videos which taugh me good basics about Mandarin pronunciation and made it much less scary. While learning about the tones, I also had to get to know the pinyin writing system (romanization with tones) to help in my studies. Unlike the Japanese romanji, some effort needs to be put in learning how to pronounce pinyin because it's not always so obvious - for instance, "cuìyù" is pronounced something like "tsoueyou", and "qì" is "tchi".
Understanding the theory of tones is one big thing, but it's worth close to nothing if you can't actually hear the tones in practice. This was very hard for me in the beginning, coming from the toneless French language, but minimal pair testing exercises helped me a lot - science shows that even if you can't hear the difference between new sounds at first, training to listen to them with direct feedback can quickly rewire your brain to hear them properly!
The apps I use for Mandarin always teach vocabulary and hanzi at the same time so I'll put them together in this category, instead of separating them like I did for Japanese.
I love Anki, a free flashcard SRS system, to learn vocabulary. For Mandarin, I use two main decks.
First of all, I use this deck, which was recommended in this reddit post. It focuses on hanzi recognition, meaning it shows a hanzi, and you have to try to remember both what it means and its pronunciation, so if you want to focus on pinyin at first this is not the deck for you. However, I like that it starts with common and useful words, and it has good quality audio for the word, as well as an exemple sentence and its audio, so it feels nice and useful. I wish it would also quizz from English (eg. "How do you say 'plane' in Mandarin?") because I find that I sometimes rely a bit too much on the hanzis and then when I think about the word without seeing them I don't necessarily remember it. Still, it's one of the best free resources out there so I'm really glad it exists!
Secondly, I make my own deck, from words I'm learning in my textbook and won't be taught soon by the above Anki deck. Generally speaking I prefer to use images over English translations, and I always try to get an audio file of the word (from Forvo). I make 3 cards per word: hanzi to meaning/pronunciation, pinyin to meaning, and meaning to pronunciation - the audio file is always on the back of the card. This of course takes quite a bit of time to set up, but I really enjoy having my own cards!
Dong Chinese might not look super sleek and modern, but it's been my favorite app to learn Mandarin so far - and it has a pretty decent free option! When you install the app on your phone and log in, you can choose between several types of lessons - I personally prefer the "read and write" one. Then, it teaches you vocabulary little by little, first to read, understand and use in simple sentences, and then to write, also in the context of sentences. The sentences are pretty silly especially in the beginning when we have limited vocabulary ("this is not my friend, this is a door"...), but the point is to get used to using the language, and for me it works quite well! I also find that writing the vocabulary in context makes it much easier to remember. The paid option allows for more daily lessons, but I've found that (especially as I use other apps on the side) one lesson is perfect for my needs, so I've never even been tempted by the paid option.
Skritter is not free, so I was only able to test it for 2 x 7 days free trials, and I also used the few free decks they have (numbers, colors, radicals). One great thing is that even without subscription, one can continue reviewing the words they've learnt during their subscription time! Skritter is made specifically to learn how to write hanzis, which is not something I had planned to do at first, but I thought I would try it. The writting part quickly grew frustrating for me as it's much harder than simply reading the hanzis or remembering their pronunciation, so I changed the settings to avoid practicing the writing for most characters, and instead focus on reading, definition, pinyin and tones. I also chose to hide the definition and pronunciation whenever I'm quizzed on a character so I can train recalling all the information every time I see it, which I find very useful.
I had a decent time using Skritter, but when I had to make a choice between several apps because I was using too many, Skritter was the one I stopped using. There are a few reasons for that:
For all of those reasons, using Skritter felt more and more like a waste of time, so I decided to stop using it. It's too bad because this is the app that everybody recommends for Mandarin, but it just didn't work for me.
I've tested Lingo Legends for about a month and although the idea was really fun, the app wasn't adapted to Mandarin in my opinion. Lingo Legends allow you to play a video game and learn a language at the same time - either you adventure, and you need to get some word quizzes right to defeat monsters, or you farm, and the quizzes help you take care of your fields and animals. The problem is the nature of the quizzes: at first we're only quizzed on hanzi (or radical) to English, without learning the pronunciation, and then it suddenly switches to full sentence structure even though we don't know the individual words forming the sentences... I really wanted to like it, but it just wasn't for me.
The Chinese Writer app is another one which didn't work too well for me. The idea is that you can study some hanzi by looking at them (no SRS or flashcard system) before playing a game where they come down quickly and you have to remember their pronunciation and writing. It wasn't too hard at first, but because the game is timed, I didn't have the time to learn the definitions and pronunciations of the hanzis I didn't know, and learning characters by just looking at them one after the other never worked for me.
I was curious about HSK Vocabulary Flashcards but turns out it's a bad Anki-lookalike with tons of ads. The only good thing is that you can "load" some vocabulary packs (eg. HSK1, HSK2, etc), but after that, it works similarly to Anki (with pronunciation, pinyin and an example sentence) except the review session will only end if you mark a new word as so well-learnt that it will only reappear in four days (I usually need next day review in the beginning)... and once your reviews are done, the ads start rolling so often that you can't navigate the app.
I've heard the Tofu app is useful to learn radicals and hanzis but it has disappeared from app stores and even its website is down so I guess it won't come back any time soon.
At some point I would also like to test out the flashcard system of the Pleco dictionnary, and the option to send flashcards from Du Chinese to Anki.
The Developing Chinese textbook has been my favorite so far. It combines phonetic practice, dialogues, grammar points, writing advice, and exercises. Whether it's their dialogues or their exercises, I think they have a good balance between challenging and doable, which is very motivating! The book audio and the solutions are available online for free. I usually go through dialogues by first listening to them a few times before checking the written version. It looks like there are both Anki and Skritter decks for this book, but I haven't tested them so I can't guarantee they're useful.
The HSK textbooks are the first ones I tried out. They are ok, but far from the best - my main problems is that their pace is really slow, and that they often have quite confusing exercises. The book audio, the workbook audio and the solutions are available online for free. Skritter has dedicated decks for the books, I only tried the first one but I think it's good! There's also an Anki deck for the books but I don't like it because it doesn't teach the words in the order the book does (so it starts with random words such as "taxi" instead of personal pronouns and such).
The Chinese Grammar Wiki is a good place to check grammar points, and can also be used to learn directly from it.
If you're looking for book without English translations, the HanYu book series has a good reputation, and is mostly in hanzi with all the vocabulary transliterated into pinyin.
Good dictionaries are important in Chinese to look up hanzi, pronunciations, stroke orders etc.
The best free app one I found is Pleco, available on Android and iOS.
I use two dictionnaries on computer:
A Chinese digital keyboard is needed to write Chinese characters on a phone or computer. I write words in pinyin and the digital keyboard switches it to hanzi (for instance if I type "cha" (tea) it will propose 茶).
Because I use Linux Ubuntu, I used this article but selected "Chinese (Simplified)" and then "Intelligent pinyin" to access the Chinese keyboard on my computer. I also modified my custom keyboard to add the ¯ and ˇ accents to make it easier to write pinyin.
There're a few apps out there designed to teach everything - vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, hanzi etc. I'm not a huge fan of those apps (I feel like they often give the illusion of progress without actual skill improvement) but I still tried a few while I was working on my pronunciation and pinyin studies.
I started by focusing only on pronunciation, and I learnt that by watching the whole "Learn Pinyin and tones" playlist by Yoyo Chinese on YouTube, then by practicing a lot with the Yoyo Chinese pinyin chart and tone pair chart. I would highly recommend this method, as the videos really demystified the pronunciations by comparing them to English sounds, explaining the mouth movements of the harder sounds, and carefully explaining the special rules concerning pinyin spelling. After understanding the theory of the sounds, I used tools like Mǎ or Mà and several Anki decks to train my ears to actually recognize those new sounds. Pronunciation training is a long journey, but it's always best to start early, as correcting pronunciation later on can be much harder.
Here comes the hard part: I've been struggling a lot to find a good way to learn hanzis. To learn Japanese kanjis, I have a great app which has allowed me to learn hundreds of kanjis and vocabulary words in a few months, but I haven't managed so far to find a good app or system for Chinese characters... At the moment, I use an Anki deck and Dong Chinese to learn, but it's far from perfect. I'm not learning much, and I'm not learning well, which slows down my overall progress as vocabulary is essential to start building my own sentences. I hope to either find a new tool which will help me better, or to make the tools I currently use work better for me.
While starting to gather some vocabulary, I also turned to grammar resources to be able to form sentences, and decided to use the Developing Chinese - Elementary Comprehensive Course books for this. It gives me listening and reading practice, grammar lessons and exercises, and I really like it!
Before even starting to learn the language, I decided to immerse myself in Chinese media quite a bit. This means that on days when I study Mandarin, I watch only Chinese TV shows, and listen to Chinese music, radio and easy podcasts. Some people do immersion by watching everything without subtitles, but understanding nothing would demotivate me very quickly, so at least for now I use subtitles when watching shows and movies in Mandarin - but I still focus on what they're saying, and always prefer when there's Chinese subtitles as well to read along! For reading practice, I use the Dú Chinese app and borrow graded readers from my library. For writing practice, I write small sentences in a paper diary (to practice hand-writing characters) two times a week and in my sentence practice page once a week.