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Mandarin Chinese

Readlang Mini-Review: A Must-Have For Language Lovers

Readlang

Rating 4.5
★★★★
★
★
Price:

Freemium, Premium subscriptions start at $5/mo

Summary

With Readlang as your Google Chrome Extension, you can have instant translations for words or sentences in over 45 languages at the tip of your mouse cursor (or fingertip)! Browse the internet and effortlessly click on unknown words to get a translation that stays on your screen until it is no longer needed. If you can’t find anything to read on the internet, you can access a bank of public texts organized by word count and difficulty, browse the most popular websites for Readlang users, or upload your own text to study. If you read on the Readlang website, you can see words that you have previously translated highlighted across every text. Readlang collects SRS flashcards for you from words that you have translated. It will only record the most useful words for you to practice based on word frequency lists, which could be either a pro or a con depending on your study goals. Each flashcard also includes audio pronunciation and the sentence from which the word was taken. You can choose to reveal the flashcard to check your comprehension, or type in your response for more effective recall. The free version provides enough for the casual user, but upgrading to an affordable premium membership allows unlimited phrase translations and unknown word highlighting across texts. Although there may be some problems with translations in beta languages, and sometimes it fails to recognize text, overall Readlang is an excellent resource for language lovers.

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An Honest Review of iTalki With Image of Man Working on Computer

italki Review – The Good, The Bad, & The Just Alright

italki

Rating 4.5
★★★★
★
★

Summary

italki is the most flexible and affordable place to find a tutor for the language you’re learning. They have a huge number of teachers offering classes to students of over 100 different languages. As a learner, you’ll be able to find a tutor that best fits your learning style, schedule, and personality. Teachers are able to set their own prices and make their own schedule.

Quality 4.5
★★★★
★
★

You’ll find everyone from long-time professionals to brand new teachers.

Thoroughness 4.0
★★★★★

The overall platform has tons of useful features but also some room for improvement.

Value 5.0
★★★★★

Huge number of teachers, low prices, and flexible scheduling.

I Like
  • There are large numbers of teachers available even for less common languages.
  • You can find skilled teachers even at low prices.
  • The flexibility to schedule lessons whenever convenient. The huge number of teachers guarantees you’ll find someone to fit your schedule.
  • The extra features in the italki Community make it easy to ask questions, get your writing checked, and find a free language exchange partner.
I Don’t Like
  • Community features are only available through the app.
  • You may need to try several tutors before finding one that fits your learning and personality style.
  • It’s easy to not take classes as often as you should.
Price

The prices vary by teacher and language with some being as low as $5 and others as high as $60 per hour. Most will fall somewhere near the $10 per hour range. Right now italki is offering a $10 credit with your first purchase.

BUY 1 ITALKI LESSON GET 1 FREE

It’s very rare for me to recommend a particular resource for everyone, regardless of the language that they’re studying. Usually each language will have their own unique resources that are great specifically for students of that language.

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Manga Mandarin Mini-Review: Learn HSK Content The Fun Way

Manga Mandarin

Rating 4.5
★★★★
★
★
Price:

Freemium, Add-ons start at $0.99, Quarterly subscription starts at $12.99

Summary

Manga Mandarin allows you to interact with Mandarin comics through reading, listening, and speaking. The content follows the teaching standards of US ACTFL, covering the breadth of HSK vocabulary as well as engaging learners in everyday Mandarin dialogues. Speakers of Russian, Thai, Arabic, English, Spanish, Korean, and Japanese can all enjoy learning Chinese from their native language. There are several topics available within the boundaries of each HSK level, from short stories about everyday life in China to fantasy series. The ‘episodes’ contains a word list, a fun comic, a review of the text within the comic, a video with cultural and grammar points, and a dubbing activity where you yourself can provide the audio for the comic. You can tap on any text within the comic to hear native speakers acting out each panel, or you can double tap to get a translation and a grammar explanation. The app has a combination of free and paid content available, so you can test out several comics before deciding if you want to invest in more material. Manga Mandarin seems to have less bugs in the iOS version than in the Android version; hopefully this will be fixed in the near future so that Android users can also enjoy the hours of engaging material available for Chinese learners.

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Chineasy App Mini Review: Enjoy Learning Chinese Characters

Chineasy app

Rating 4.5
★★★★
★
★
Price:

Freemium, $12.99/Month, $49.99/Year, $149.99/Lifetime

Summary

Chineasy is an excellent introduction to both traditional and simplified Chinese for any beginner learner. The lessons will help you remember the characters through short, fascinating histories of their origins and the colorful artwork. As you learn about the characters, you also discover how beautiful the Chinese culture is. 

Each of the 500 plus levels will introduce new characters, combine ones you’ve already learned, and quiz you in various formats. You can further your learning with speaking training, which will train your comprehension of the tones and help you replicate them through pronunciation practice. If you struggle with writing characters—whether you’re a beginner or advanced learner— you may find that Chineasy’s Practice Writing feature makes it a lot easier. The app also includes an SRS flashcard option to help you practice and retain Chinese vocabulary. When you review vocabulary, you can swipe right or left to sort them and track your performance stats. 

Moreover, Chineasy includes a test function called Check Points to help test your progress accordingly and move forward to the next level. As you advance, you’ll be able to recognize over a thousand Chinese characters and words in your daily conversations across different topics. 

As a beginner resource, Chineasy helps you grasp the basics of the Chinese language from Chinese characters and words to helping you practice your speaking, reading & writing. You’ll have access to real-life, practical content that’ll get you communicating not only with fellow learners but also with native speakers. Aside from the app, Chineasy offers additional learning materials in the form of blog posts, videos & podcasts. 

Nevertheless, even intermediate learners will probably find the history of the characters interesting. You may not be fluent at the end of the lessons, but you will most likely become confident with basic pronunciation and characters. With the app’s attractive user interface and engaging content, learning Chinese as a beginner couldn’t be more enjoyable.

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Sublearning Mini-Review: There Are Better Uses For Your Time

Sublearning

Rating 1.3
★
★
★★★★
Price:

Free

Summary

Sublearning is a very simple website that supposedly helps you learn languages through movie subtitles. You will be presented with 1 to 6 lines of subtitles from your chosen movie, and then you can reveal the translation after thinking about the response. There are 62 source and target languages, which does make one wonder where the translations are coming from; be wary of Sublearning’s translation quality. Just to clarify, the subtitles do not seem to be sourced from the most iconic phrases from your favourite movies; rather, they seem to be random lines from the movie, sometimes as simple as “I don’t think so”. If you’re just looking to reminisce about anything that was said in movies you have seen, you can go to Sublearning to pass some time. However if you’re interested in language learning, I recommend checking out some of the many resource reviews we have on this site.

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Bluebird Languages Mini-Review: Over 160 Languages Available

Bluebird Languages

Rating 2.5
★★
★
★★★
Price:

Free, Premium subscriptions cost $13.99/mo, $144.99/year

Summary

Bluebird Languages has several types of lessons you can choose from, including a daily lesson, core vocabulary, essential verbs, creating sentences, powerful phrases, and conversation. Each topic seems to have a beginner, intermediate, and advanced lesson, although it’s not clear how advanced “advanced” is. In each lesson, an English-speaking narrator will ask you to listen to and repeat translations of various phrases. The recordings in each language seem to use native speakers’ voices, which is quite the feat considering they have lessons in over 160 languages. Bluebird Languages’ phrases don’t construct a replicable dialogue, so the phrases don’t seem to have a lot of context other than the topic at hand. Furthermore, the topics seem to be identical in all languages, so most of the phrases will not be culture-specific. They also don’t break down complicated pronunciation, but you can try to break it down yourself by slowing down the recording to 0.5x speed. Bluebird Languages seems similar to Pimsleur but appears less organized and will probably not improve your communication abilities as quickly. Nevertheless, it may be a good free alternative for beginners, and the program will probably help you develop some confidence in speaking languages that have less challenging pronunciation. The conversation and personalized lessons require a monthly membership, but there is enough free content that these add-ons may not be necessary.

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FunEasyLearn Mini-Review: Build Vocabulary The Fun Way

FunEasyLearn

Rating 2.6
★★
★
★★★
Price:

Freemium, monthly subscriptions starting at $11.99

Summary

Not only does FunEasyLearn have a slick app interface, high-quality recordings of native speakers, and a variety of activities to reinforce your learning, but it also allows you to learn from 61 mother tongues. The lessons were developed by a team of certified linguists and acting teachers; they cover reading, listening, speaking and writing. You have the choice of learning individual vocabulary or common phrases, both of which navigate between various common categories such as “Describing people”, “General Conversation”, “ and “Transport”. Unfortunately, FunEasyLearn does not seem to provide a foundation for learning more challenging scripts, such as Chinese or Thai; luckily they have a special feature where you can choose to omit the writing aspect and see transliterations; this will allow you to focus on speaking and listening. Ultimately, FunEasyLearn is a fun and easy way to develop some basic vocabulary, but it is probably not the most effective resource for hard-core language learners; you will need to use another resource if you want to learn more than basic vocabulary words.

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Lingua Boost Mini-Review: Use Pimsleur Instead

Lingua Boost

Rating 2.2
★★
★
★★★
Price:

1 level costs $19.90, two levels cost $33.90

Summary

Lingua Boost’s website sells downloadable volumes of phrasebook-like lessons that teach everyday phrases in context. The lessons are about 10 minutes long; they are narrated by native speakers and focus on vocabulary within a specific topic. Although each lesson seems to contain something that resembles a dialogue, every phrase is spoken by the same person. Additionally, many of the lessons initially appear to be dialogues, but end up as a list of sentences. For example, the first line of a lesson might be, “what do you like to do?” followed by a series of statements such as “I like to read books,” or “I like to go swimming.” Furthermore, for languages that have more difficult pronunciation, such as Russian and Hindi, the lessons do not break down pronunciation. In Pimsleur, for example, they use an excellent technique of working backwards with each syllable in a word. In Lingua Boost, it seems that you are expected to just listen and gradually catch on, even from the absolute beginner level. Finally, each volume must be purchased separately, but you can test out the first 5 lessons for free on their website. If you’re looking for a similar course that breaks down pronunciation, has interactive activities and helps you learn full dialogues in context, check out Pimsleur’s subscription plan.

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LingoHut Mini-Review: Good Intentions, So-So Follow Through

lingohut

Rating 2.0
★★★★★
Price:

Free

Summary

Kendal and Philipp, the creators of the LingoHut, are passionate about teaching languages. Their website supposedly helps A1 and A2 language learners develop their confidence in listening and pronunciation. All audio clips were recorded by native speakers so that beginners can get accustomed to natural pronunciation, and each lesson has a series of matching games for listening comprehension and reading. Unfortunately, the creators’ genuine intention to support beginners doesn’t seem to translate into their lessons. The lessons are essentially a series of phrases that are not adapted to each language’s culture; each of the 50 languages use the exact same set of sentences and lesson formats. This means that you will learn how to say ‘dumpling’ both in Chinese and Italian. There is also no section to learn the script of languages such as Korean, Hindi, or Arabic, nor are there transliterations to help beginners sound out the pronunciation. Furthermore, some sentences switch between formal and informal language without explanation, which would not be intuitive for an A1 learner. If you want a free resource to listen to native speakers’ pronunciation of hundreds of common phrases, LingoHut is definitely a free option. However, there are other resources that can help you learn languages more effectively.

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L-Lingo Mini-Review: Textbook Content, Depends On Your Style

L-Lingo

Rating 3.0
★★★★★
Price:

$14.95/mo, $75/half-year, $120/year

Summary

Each language on L-Lingo contains 105 lessons and 5000 words. The lessons seem to be the same in every language, and will teach you typical textbook lessons, such as booking a hotel reservation, naming different colours, or navigating to an airport. If you are looking for something that will help you communicate naturally with native speakers, this probably isn’t the resource for you. Similar to Rosetta Stone, L-Lingo plays an audio recording of a sentence or word, and then asks you to find the image that corresponds to what you just heard. Unlike Rosetta Stone, L-Lingo provides seemingly clear and concise grammar explanations of the concept you are about to learn. They provide three types of quizzes with every lesson, and also use Spaced Repetition Software to help you remember new vocabulary. There are currently some technical difficulties signing up on the website, but you can access their content on your mobile device. The program has mixed reviews on various platforms, but you can check out the first five lessons for free to see if it suits what you’re looking for.

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