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New Chinese Learning App Roundup!

There’s been quite a few great new apps released for both iOS and Android recently that would make a great addition to any Chinese learner’s toolbox. So in this post I wanted to highlight a few of them and share with everyone to take a look at! I’ve also included screenshots at the very end of the post.

Pinyin Browser152x152

  • Platform: iOS (iPhone, iPad)
  • Free but has in-app purchases
  • Official app website can be found here.

Pinyin Browser is a lovely little browser app that allows you to insert Pinyin or even Zhuyin above the text on any website that has Chinese text. This is a great way to practice pronunciation as you read news, blog posts, and more on the web.

In the free version, you’re limited to what websites you can visit. To get access beyond these trial sites, you need to pay $1.99 to upgrade.

You can find Pinyin Browser for iOS here.

Laowai Pro975318_larger

  • Platform: iOS (iPhone, iPad)
  • Free but offers in-app purchases
  • Official app website can be found here

A relatively lightweight app, Laowai Pro provides a selection of texts for you to read and lookup words as you go. It also has flashcards and an SRS system integrated into it, though I prefer using the app to read. The selection of texts are primarily Chinese Classics and a few news articles. Dream of the Red Mansion is also included.

The app also has the options to switch to Traditional, too. You can pay $1.99 to remove ads and $4.99 to get a stack of 30,000+ flashcards.

You can find Laowai Pro for iOS here.

Mandaread836515_larger

  • Platform iOS (iPhone, iPad); Android coming soon
  • Free but requires account
  • Official app website can be found here.

Some may remember the early stages of the Mandaread website, and while it seemed dormant for a while, they’ve come out with a rather well done app. They have a large variety of texts organized by level (Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced) and offer popups for each vocabulary word in the text. I also appreciate that they have pre-defined courses to get you started.

One downside is that you can’t switch between Traditional and Simplified Chinese, with the app currently only offering the texts in Simplified.

You can get Mandaread for iOS here.

For all the Above..

I’d recommend picking them all up since they’re all free and really good at different things. Plus, the articles in both Laowai Pro and Mandaread are quite different, so you’ll always have interesting and new content to read.

Have you used any of these? Let me know what you think in the comments!

For screenshots of the apps, click below.

Screenshots:

Click any of the screenshots below to see full sized versions! 🙂

Pinyin Browser

PinyinBrowser_PinyinPinyinBrowser_Zhuyin

Laowai Pro

LaowaiPro_ReadingModeLaowaiPro_CharacterLookup

Mandaread

MandaRead_IntroMandaRead_MainScreenMandaRead_Courses

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3 thoughts on “New Chinese Learning App Roundup!”

  1. Felisa
    Reply

    Some great looking apps listed here. Although, I do wish it had been made clearer from the beginning that they were all for Apple devices, I kept scrolling in anticipation of some recommended Android apps 🙁

    1. zhongruige
      Reply

      Actually I’m glad you brought it up! I’ve been playing with my new Android phone recently and thought it would be nice to put together a similar list for that. Now that I know people are interested I’m going to get to work on such a post!

      Thank you for your comment! If you have any particular Android apps you’d recommend feel free to let me know too 🙂

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