HelloChinese – New Chinese Mandarin learning App (learn Chinese & speak Chinese)

[Chong]

I'm introducing HelloChinese - A game-based interactive Mandarin Chinese learning app, tailored specifically for beginners.

 

To make Chinese learning effective and fun, we design HelloChinese like an engaging game. But unlike a number of other game-based products, HelloChinese designs the course content like a step-by-step textbook. It covers all aspects, reading, writing, listening, speaking and even handwriting. Considering many learners are not so good at speaking, I put a lot efforts designing the speaking exercises using speech recognition.

 

Highlights:

• Rated 4.8+ stars on both App Store and Google Play.
• 2,000,000+ installs across all platforms.
• Ranks #1 Chinese learning app over 50+ countries.
• Featured on the homepage of the App Store globally (year 2017).

 

Target Users:

1. Total beginners: who are interested in starting to learn Chinese
2. Intermediate learners:  to refresh their Chinese and improve speaking skills

 

Features:

• Game-based Chinese learning: You will never get bored.
• Speech recognition corrects your pronunciation and makes speaking Chinese a breeze.
• Handwriting specially designed to learn Chinese characters at a faster rate.
• Innovative self-adaptive learning games that incorporate Chinese cultural education.
• Supports learning Chinese from 8 languages: English, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, and Vietnamese.
• Systematic courses based on HSK levels.
• A well-designed Pinyin (pronunciation) course for newbies.
• Bite-sized curriculum to fortify your Chinese listening, speaking, reading and writing skills.
• Simplified and traditional Chinese(Mandarin) are both supported.
• Offers standardized Chinese Mandarin audio spoken strictly by native speakers.
• Displays Chinese as pinyin or characters as you like.
• Offline accessibility, study progress tracking across multiple devices.

 

Download Links:

• Get HelloChinese for Iphone/Ipad
• Get HelloChinese for Android

 

 

You can also find more details and our contact info on our website http://www.hellochinese.cc

Thank you!

 

   

Edited May 5, 2017 at 08:53 AM by Chong
updated introduction according to recent status

[Shelley]

I have been using this nice little app for a couple of weeks now. I am pleasantly surprised at how much I like it. I really like the fact that it has a section for speaking out loud (as I have no other speaking help, this is great) and it actually works very well.

 

There was mention of it not being very good at catching tone mistakes, but I have not found this to be true. It would be interesting to hear from Chong about what algorithms it uses.

 

I like the balance between reading, writing, listening and speaking.

 

From a visual point of view it is very well laid out and looks very attractive.

 

It also works very well, no glitches, no waiting unnecessarily. I have a copy on my tablet and my phone and because I used the same email address and log in with the same details, it updates between the two very smoothly and it is seamless using either one, which is handy when you have your phone and ten minutes at the doctors waiting to be seen or similar. It allows you to skip the speaking parts so you can still study even if it is a bad noise environment.

 

Once you have loaded a lesson you don't need to be online, that is also very useful for travelling.

 

All in all its a very useful and attractive app to study with.

 

I must say Thank you to Chong for making this available for free, without adds, and so well made.

[Chong]

Shelley, I forwarded your review to my developers.  And it's really a big motivation for them!

 

Regarding the tone concern, let me explain the algorithm details as below,

 

1.     How our speech evaluating algorithm was designed?

The goal of the speaking exercises is to improve learners’ speaking skills to a conversational level. To achieve the goal, we introduced intelligibility as the algorithm measurement. Our algorithm evaluates a voice’s intelligibility from three aspects, syllable (consonant&vowel) correctness, tone and smoothness between syllables. Each is assigned with a weighting factor. So speakers doing well in all 3 aspects get a high evaluation score.

Considering the fact that total beginners always get frustrated if we set the bar too high for tone, and the fact that tone doesn’t affect intelligibility much in daily conversations, so we assigned a smaller weighting factor for tone correctness. So to be honest, tone accuracy is NOT 100% evaluated. But that doesn’t mean tone is not evaluated at all.

 

2.     Any feature in the app to correct tones specially?

“Focusing on syllable correctness -> Improve tonal correctness and the overall smoothness”. This is the learning curve we encourage in our app. So to make learners open their mouths and speak is the goal of the current basic lessons. To achieve the second goal of improving tonal skills, we have another algorithm to do that. Hopefully it can be available in a few releases.

 

 

Hope my explanation answers your question and thank you very much for your support.

There's still a long way to go to make HelloChinese a perfect app. We will continuously improve it!

[Shelley]

Thank you for your explanation, I agree that to start with it is important to start speaking as soon as possible. I think tones should be tackled right from the start but as you say its not good to set the bar too high to begin with, which is why I am glad you are adding some more tonal skills.

 

Thanks again

[roddy]

Chong, please make sure anyone who works for your company says so when posting about your app. 

[Chong]

HelloChinese new version released with a new speaking feature added!

 

People usualy have trouble pronouncing some words much more than others. It would be helpful to help them practice just those words.

So we added a mode in speaking exercises to train pronouncing any word mispronounced.

 

How it works?

App plays back how the word should be pronounced, and you have to repeat it 3 times and get a score rather than just right or wrong for each repetition. The score is between 0 and 5 rated by our speech recognition algorithm. You can also listen to what you said so that you can hear for yourself how it sounded like.

 

How to launch this mode?

Long press any word in a speaking exercise and the new page(see below screenshot) would pop up.

 

 

android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hellochinese

ios:        https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1001507516  (new feature for ios will be available in a few days)

 

Here are two screenshots of the new feature:

 

 

 

 

Best regards!

[Shelley]

I have been and update Hellochinese and now have this new mode available. It is good, its very tough it doesn't let you get away with any mistakes, this is good but hard.

 

It is very good for things that I might get consistently wrong.

 

May I make a suggestion? it would be good if in review mode for writing characters you can try writing without the red arrows? The red arrows are good when you first learn but it would be good to try and have to remember by yourself, if you get stuck maybe you can ask for a hint and have just the next stroke shown as a red arrow, and if you get it completely wrong it could go through again with the red arrows, then you can try again without the arrows.

 

Once again Thank you for your efforts.

[Chong]

@Shelley,  the training mode is specially for correcting vocabulary pronunciations, it's a little hard, but no pain no gain

 

Hiding the red arrow in character practice is a good idea, and in fact also proposed by some other users. We need to improve the user experience after removing the arrow, so need some extra effort. Stay tuned.

[Shelley]

Very true, no pain no gain.

 

Thanks for taking on board the idea of hiding the red arrow.

 

I will definitely stay tuned.

[Chong]

Hey, All,

 

We just released a new version for both ios and android.

In this new release, a cool "FREE DRAW" mode with the red arrow removed was introduced for character handwriting practice. I'm very happy we finally made it since this feature has been requesting by many our loved users.

 

Below screenshots illustrate how it works. For each stroke, you write it from your memory and our app recognizes whether it's correct or not.  It's fun and also helps learn writing characters at a fast rate.

Hope you love it. It's the first version for this feature and feel free to leave your suggestions here on how to make it better!

 

@Shelley this is also what you'd like to see. Try it out! 

 

Thanks!

 

 

[Lumbering Ox]

I mentioned elsewhere, I wish there was more pinyin stuff. In particular, the ability to review via flashcards and also to have some of the closer sounding ones side by side and be required to pick the right ones.

 

Say if A B and C were easy to confuse.

 

You would hear B A C and then have the 3 options in every combo and have to pick the right one.

 

 

I quite love HelloChinese, if they ever made Human App marriage legal, I'd so be putting a ring on its finger.

[Shelley]

This is an excellent addition to the app. It completes the things you need to practice and learn chinese with HelloChinese. Thank you very much.

[Chong]

@BrainP very happy you like my app! 

 

Your suggestion of more Pinyin stuff is quite inspiring. It might be better to build it as a add-on Pinyin game. I will discuss to see whether we have bandwidth to develop it.

[zhouhaochen]

We just published an in depth review of HelloChinese on our blog http://www.livethelanguage.cn/review-hello-chinese/

 

It was not written by myself (when I studied Chinese all we had were paper dictionaries and sometimes - if were lucky - access to email), but another very respected member of this community and frequent contributor to this thread   

 

Sounds like a good tool to use.

[Lumbering Ox]

I would figure as you have flashcards for word vocab that get uncovered as you do more lessons it wouldn't be much to add some more released when you finish the pronunciation section. However I don't know anything about apps.

[Chong]

HelloChinese released a new feature called "TRAIN" for both android and ios. 

 

With this new feature added, you can consolidate what you have learned in the normal learning process. 

• Strengthen all the words and CHARACTERS using flashcards.
• Save difficult words and characters so as to practice them later.

 

Try it out and feel free to give me any feedback or suggestions. 

 

Thanks!

 

 

Screenshot 1:  choose the mode you  like to play with

 

 

Screenshot 2:  Practice handwriting characters in flashcard mode

[Shelley]

This looks great.

 

If I go and update the app will it include this new feature?

 

Thank you once again for continuing to improve this wonderful app.

[Shelley]

Ok I updated the app and now have the new feature. How do I access the handwriting practice in the flashcard mode?

 

I tried clicking the little brush but nothing happened, am I doing something wrong?

[Chong]

@Shelley  

Yes, this new feature is available now on both App Store and Play Store.   Thanks for your continuous support,  HelloChinese fan   

[Chong]

Shelley,  it works the same way as word flashcards. Click the bottom "Review" button  as shown in my screenshot 1 and then select cards you'd like to practice and then just tap "go".