Chinese Learning Apps for Android Roundup

This post is a follow-up to the New Chinese Learning App Roundup post, but this time we’ll be focusing on apps for Android!

While messing around on my Android phone, I went through and grabbed what seemed like the most useful apps from the Google Play store for Chinese study. Check out the list of apps after the jump!

ChineseSkill

ChineseSkill is kind of a combination of Duolingo and Rosetta Stone. It gives you a word (such as “people”) and you choose the correct picture, which has the Chinese character and the pronunciation in Pinyin next to it. if you select wrong, it lets you know what the correct answer is.

One cool thing though are the checks during it. The app asks you to combine parts of characters to form the one it’s asking for, choosing the pinyin pronunciation of the phrase, writing the English translation, and more. It’s pretty helpful as you go through learning.

Where it surpasses Rosetta Stone, however, are with its bonus features: a Pinyin pronunciation table with audio, a survival kit with downloadable situational phrases, and Chinese character writing practice.

For wearable folks: ChineseSkill will also push reminders out to your watch, so you can be reminded to keep up practicing.

You can find it on the Google Play store here.

Number Trainer

Number Trainer is, not surprisingly, focused entirely on Chinese number training. It’s a free app, and there’s a few ads that remind you of it. But it has some nice features, such as a clock that you can move the hands up to get different times read aloud in Chinese (although a number pad and a changeable digital clock face may have been better than an analog one). There’s also a feature to write any number you want and it’ll read it to you–up to a certain limit. Finally there’s a quiz portion where it will quiz you on the Chinese character, the sound, the Pinyin and the English.

Is it worth the money for an upgraded version? Eh, hard to say. It’s definitely a great start and if you are struggling with numbers it just may be worth the cost.

You can find it on the Google Play store here.

Hanping

This is quite quickly becoming one of my favorite dictionaries, and in some ways beats out Pleco for me. Especially with its clipboard monitoring, where it watches for Hanzi. Any copied ones will appear in the notifications menu, and tapping on it will then open it up in the Hanping dictionary. Beautifully designed–doesn’t get in the way of your regular browsing or article reading, but the ones you wanted to look up later are always there on the clipboard, ready for review when you’re done. Love this feature, and it’s even on the free version too!

There’s a paid version available, which I definitely recommend. They also have a Cantonese dictionary too, which I highly recommend if you’re going that route.

You can find it on the Google Play store here.

Google Keyboards for Input (PinYin/Zhuyin)

I actually find that the Google Keyboards work pretty well, and I suggest giving them a shot for your Chinese input. They do have some flaws, but overall I think they’re pretty good.

No screenshots, but how terribly exciting are keyboards anyway? :p

You can find it on the Google Play store here.

Mnemosyne

This lightweight SRS flashcard app has been around for a while, originally as a desktop version. It’s actually my go-to flashcard app at times, just because it’s so gosh darn simple and small and lightweight, I kind of love it.

That being sad, the app relies entirely on syncing with the desktop app. This has caused some headaches and can be a bit annoying to get set up. It would be nicer if you could load the flashcards onto the phone’s internal storage and run the reviews that way, but if you can get the syncing to work, it’s a nice simple study tool that won’t bog you down.

You can find it on the Google Play store here.

In Conclusion

There’s quite a lot of Chinese learning tools and apps available on Android, just as their are for iOS. In addition, there’s plenty of carryovers between the two, such as Skritter, Pleco, WaiChinese and many more. Either way, both platforms have a ton of great options available to you as a Chinese language learner. Hopefully this is a list to get you started, or to even bolster some of your current skills.

Did I miss any? Are there ones you prefer over these? Share in the comments below!