The Best Apps to Learn Chinese, and the Two That Cannot Teach It

FE By Fawnio Editorial Team, Family safety and learning-tech reviewers at Fawnio.
Company documentation review · Updated July 24, 2026

Why Chinese is a different shopping trip

With Spanish or French, almost every app can teach you, so the choice is about style. Chinese narrows the field, and it does so in a way that catches people off guard.

First, the tones are the real difficulty, and no app fixes them. Mandarin is tonal: the same syllable spoken with a different tone is a different word entirely. Getting a tone wrong is not an accent, it is the wrong word. An app can play you a tone and ask you to pick it from a list, but it cannot listen to you say a whole sentence and tell you the third tone slipped, which is precisely the correction a beginner needs. This is the single strongest reason to reach a teacher earlier in Chinese than in most languages.

Second, the writing is a long build, not an early win. As italki puts it plainly, "Chinese has no true alphabet." Chinese is written in characters, and pinyin, the system that writes Mandarin sounds in the Roman alphabet, is the bridge that lets you start speaking and reading before you know many characters. The trap is staying on pinyin forever: it feels fast, but you cannot read a sign, a menu or a message without characters, so the honest plan treats pinyin as a start and characters as the real reading work.

Third, the grammar is the easy part. This surprises people who assume a hard language is hard everywhere. Mandarin has no verb conjugation, no tenses to memorise, no grammatical gender and no plural endings. Its grammar is different from English, but it is not the mountain the tones and characters are, which changes where your effort and money should go.

And fourth, half the usual apps opt out. Two of the biggest names in language learning do not offer Chinese at all, and plenty of comparison articles never mention it. Getting that straight is the first money-saver on this page.

The sequence that works for Chinese: start on pinyin and characters free, add a human as soon as you are forming simple sentences so your tones get corrected early, and use a grammar-focused tool alongside if you like the rules spelled out. Everything below is sorted into that order rather than by which company we can earn from.

Duolingo, the free way to start pinyin and characters

Duolingo is the right first step because a free app you open daily is the right tool for the earliest layer: pinyin and your first characters. On its Chinese course, Duolingo teaches pinyin, the phonetic system that writes Chinese sounds in the Roman alphabet, and pairs it with character introduction and character-matching exercises so you connect each sound with its written form. Everyone can use its courses for free, with ads for free users and paid tiers that add an ad-free experience and AI features.

Where it stops, honestly: it cannot hear your tones and correct them, and it cannot hold an unscripted conversation, so it will not get you past the point where tones and speaking begin to matter. Use it to start pinyin, characters and vocabulary, then add a teacher for the tones. We do not publish a Super or Max price here; prices vary by region and channel, so check the number shown in your own app. There is no commercial relationship between Fawnio and Duolingo, and no link to it.

italki, the cheapest way to fix your tones

A marketplace where you book one-to-one video lessons with individual Chinese teachers who set their own prices, with no subscription and no schedule imposed on you. italki lists native Chinese teachers, splits them into professional teachers, who upload documents showing training and teaching experience, and community tutors, who provide conversation practice, and it runs a Mandarin level test with preparation for the HSK and HSKK, the standard Chinese proficiency exams. Its published price bands are 10 to 120 dollars per lesson for professional teachers and 5 to 120 dollars for community tutors.

For Chinese this is the highest-value step on the page, because the one thing an app cannot do, hear your tones in a real sentence and correct them, is exactly what a native teacher does, and conversation practice with a community tutor starts at 5 dollars a lesson. italki's own estimate is that reaching fluency takes at least 2,200 class hours, so the earlier a teacher is fixing your tones, the less of that time is spent practising them wrong.

The trade-off is the money mechanic, and we say it on every italki page: you buy italki Credits rather than lessons, the payment terms state that no refunds are given for credits purchased, credits expire after twelve months of account inactivity, and lesson packages must be used within six months. Top up for the lessons you have scheduled. There is a real protection worth knowing: the satisfaction guarantee covers trial lessons, twice, claimed within 48 hours.

Our italki review covers the tiers and the guarantee in detail, how much italki costs turns the ranges into monthly budgets, and italki vs Preply compares it with the other big tutor marketplace.

Browse Chinese teachers on italki

Mondly, if English is not your first language

A self-study app that teaches Chinese and whose genuine differentiator is that it teaches from your own native language rather than routing every lesson through English. If your household speaks Turkish, Polish, Spanish or Portuguese, that removes a translation step that quietly slows Chinese down. Mondly's own Chinese pages describe short daily lessons built around common phrases, native-speaker audio, and conversation practice. The free tier covers daily lessons; Premium adds conversation practice, pronunciation lessons, grammar guides and kids content.

Two honest limits. The conversation feature is scripted practice rather than an open-ended tutor, so treat it as speaking drills, not a substitute for a person, and it will not make you fluent on its own, which matters most for tones. And the refund position is regional: Mondly's terms state that amounts are non-refundable unless stated otherwise and grant a 14-day cooling-off right only to subscribers in the UK and EU. On the US App Store the listing showed a 4.7 out of 5 rating while Trustpilot showed 2.6 out of 5, with the low scores driven by billing rather than teaching. Our Mondly review works through the free-versus-Premium split, the current prices and the refund terms.

See what Mondly Premium includes

LingoDeer, for grammar explained

LingoDeer was built for East Asian languages, and its reputation is for explaining grammar, the reasons behind sentence structure. Its own Chinese page describes a course for English speakers with detailed grammar tips taught one step at a time, every sentence voiced by native speakers, and a range from A1, absolute beginner, to B1, intermediate. Because Chinese grammar is the manageable part, LingoDeer is less essential here than on a grammar-heavy language, but if you learn better when the rules are spelled out it is a reasonable structured self-study option to run alongside a teacher. We name it as a benchmark, publish no price for it because none was verified, and do not link to it.

The two that do not teach Chinese

This matters enough to state on its own, because both come up constantly and both are dead ends for Chinese.

• Babbel teaches around a dozen languages, almost all European, and Chinese, which uses characters, is not one of them. Babbel is a well-regarded structured course for European languages; it is simply not a Chinese product.
• Lingoda, the live-class school we cover elsewhere, teaches six languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Business English. It has no Chinese classes. For a scheduled-class format in Chinese you would need a different provider; on this page the live-teacher role goes to italki instead.

Neither is a criticism of the product. It is a warning about comparison articles that list them for Chinese without checking. We name both only as benchmarks and link to neither.

The options side by side

Simplified or traditional, a decision to make early

One choice is worth settling before you get far. Mandarin is written two ways: simplified characters, used in mainland China and Singapore, and traditional characters, used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. The spoken language is the same; the written form differs. For most beginners aiming at mainland China, simplified is the usual default. The practical point for shopping is that not every app or teacher makes clear which one they use, so decide your goal first and then check, because switching the script you have learned to read later is extra work you would rather avoid.

If the learner is a child

The same sequence holds with one addition: an adult stays in the loop. italki states that most of its users are adults, asks parents to create and manage the account and to communicate with teachers themselves, warns that not all teachers are prepared to teach kids and points to its Kids category filter, and tells parents to supervise lessons. Mondly includes kids content in Premium and, because it teaches from your own language, suits a household where Chinese is a third language. A free pinyin-and-character app suits an older child starting out, with reading a few characters as the first goal rather than conversation.

What we would do

Spend nothing for the first stretch and start pinyin and your first characters on a free tier until they come without effort. Then book two or three trial lessons with native teachers, one community tutor for conversation and one professional if you want structure or HSK preparation, and keep the one worth meeting again, because the tones and speaking are where Chinese actually gets hard and only a person corrects them. If you learn better with the rules explained, run a grammar-focused self-study app alongside, though Chinese grammar is the lighter part. And do not spend an afternoon trying to make Babbel or Lingoda teach you Chinese, because neither one does. The full comparison of the teaching shapes, and the credit and renewal mechanics behind each, is on our language learning hub. Curious how the same problem looks in another language? Our best apps to learn Japanese shares the character challenge, our best apps to learn Korean flips it with an easy alphabet and hard grammar, and our best apps to learn Arabic trades tones for the choice between Modern Standard Arabic and a dialect.

Frequently asked questions

How we reach these verdicts, and the sources behind them, is on our methodology page. Duolingo's Chinese course details come from Duolingo's own description of the course; italki's price bands, credit rules, its "Chinese has no true alphabet" wording, the HSK and HSKK level test, the class-hours estimate and Kids category, Mondly's Chinese lessons, free and Premium contents and refund terms, and LingoDeer's grammar focus and level range were read from each company's own pages and verified July 24, 2026. That Babbel and Lingoda do not offer Chinese was confirmed against their own course listings. We publish no price for Duolingo or LingoDeer because neither returned a public figure we verified, and no Mondly price here because it belongs with the current figures in our review. App store and Trustpilot ratings are attributed to their platforms. We earn a commission if you sign up to italki or Mondly through our links; Duolingo, LingoDeer, Babbel and Lingoda are named for comparison only and are not linked.