3 Best Mobile Apps to Learn Chinese (中文); Read Anything YOU Like, Study Only Words YOU Choose!

There's got to be a better way! 一定有个更好玩的学习方法吧！

So you’ve passed the HSK, and you’re tired of textbook exercises. But you’re still not “fluent”. Learning Chinese is not your only hobby. You enjoy reading for fun, too.

Here’s the ultimate method to practice reading Chinese and build advanced vocabulary — all from the convenience of your mobile phone, and all from reading materials that you are actually interested in.

Hanping Pro is an offline Chinese-English dictionary app for your Android phone. (Or Pleco for iOS.) Anki is a flashcards app, with a powerful algorithm to maximize study retention rate.

Put together, you’ve got a real one-two punch. 合起来真爽啊！

Read Chinese from any source you want: news or blogs within your browser, eBooks in your PDF viewer, or emails from your Chinese contacts.

Hanping allows you to easily lookup English translations of Chinese characters on the fly. And after a quick setup, Anki stores them as flashcards that you can study later.

How do I get it? 哇塞，APP拿来吧！

You can download both apps from Google Play, total $12.98 USD. (No, I’m not a paid promoter; just a customer telling you is totally worth it.)

• Hanping Pro --- $2.99 --- Download here! --- This is the offline Chinese-English dictionary.
• Hanping Chinese Popup --- $9.99 --- Download here! --- This allows you to quickly look up Chinese characters live from any other app, without locating radicals, counting strokes etc.
• AnkiDroid Flashcards --- FREE --- Download here! --- This is the flashcards interface.

How do I use it? 没得说明书，怎办呢？

To get started, download and install the apps to your phone, and follow directions to register your AnkiWeb account.

Then activate the connection between the two apps. On the main screen of Hanping Pro, click the menu icon (three horizontal bars) in the upper-left corner. Go to Settings > AnkiDroid Flashcards, then turn on Auto-Export Cards.

If prompted for Default Card Type, then choose the option best suited for your study goals (usually Q: Hanzi, A: Pronunciation & Meaning or Q:Meaning, A: Hanzi & Pronunciation).

Time to start reading! 那么快就弄好了！

To look up words and save them to your vocab list, open the Hanping Chinese Popup app, navigate to your reading material, slide the floating loop icon over a Chinese charavert to see a translation, and finally click the star icon in the upper-right hand corner of the popup box.

You can continue reading, looking up, and starring words. When you check AnkiDroid, you'll have them all ready to study as a custom deck of flashcards. Nice!

An extra tip: word groups! 词组细分？太棒了！

Anki has the ability to read tags for each vocab word, and allows you to create flashcard lists for a single tag. This is very helpful to organize your vocab lists based different topics. Here’s an example.

Say you enjoy reading two genres of articles online, cooking and tech news. Immediately after starring your first vocab word from a cooking-related article, navigate to the All Starred vocab list within Hanping.

The word you just starred will be the first word in the list. Click the word, then click the action items icon (three dots) at the lower right of the screen. Select Tags > Create Tag, then type the tag name, “Cooking”, then click OK. Next, press and hold on “Cooking” tag, and choose Set As Default.

Now you can go back to the article the article and continue reading.Each word you star using Hanping will now automatically be tagged with “Cooking”.

When you want to review cooking-related words exclusively, press and hold on the Hanping Chinese deck, then choose Custom Study > Limit to Particular Tags, then choose the “Cooking” tag.

A new deck in blue text will appear, it will include only cards from the Hanping Chinese deck that are tagged with “Cooking”. You can rename the custom study session to “Cooking” by pressing and holding the new deck, then clicking Rename Deck.

When you start reading your first tech news article follow the same steps to set the “Tech News” tag as default. Each time you start reading another article, make sure the default tag is set correctly in Hanping.

Happy reading, happy learning! 望着一条学习彩虹！

Christian D. Rozier is an up-and-coming digital marketer and project manager with an MMSci in Marketing from #8 top-ranked Chinese university and a BA in Mandarin Chinese from USA’s #10 ranked most innovative college. He is passionate about internet and e-business — especially pertaining to China. Christian D. Rozier is actively seeking new opportunities to develop fine-tuned marketing strategies for the next big internet success story.

Comments and questions are welcome!