Learn Chinese · McChinese®

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The card at the top tracks your streak, your level and XP, and your daily goal — ten items a day by default. The Review button inside it starts a spaced-repetition session, and the number in brackets tells you how many cards are due right now. Tap the trophy to see your achievements.

Below the card is a grid of round shortcuts: Learn, Listen, Test, Speak, Pinyin, Write, Flash Card, Games and Settings. They are shortcuts to the same places the bottom tabs go, plus the practice tools that do not have a tab of their own.

The practice shortcuts

Speak reads a phrase to you and scores your pronunciation against it. Pinyin drills initials, finals and tones separately. Write animates the stroke order of a character and then asks you to trace it. Flash Card is a fast flip-through of a level or of your favorites. Games opens the four mini-games.

Choosing a level

The Learn tab splits into words (字与词) and sentences (句子与文章). Either way you start here, by picking HSK 1–6 or a Grade 1–6 list. Three extra entries sit at the bottom: My Favorites (everything you have hearted), My Word Collection, and My Teaching — a separate list for anyone using the app to teach someone else.

Word list

Every level is chopped into short lessons so you are never staring at a thousand rows. Tap the speaker on a row to hear it without leaving the list, tap the heart to save it to My Favorites, or tap the row itself to open the full word card.

Word card

The character sits on a big card with its pinyin underneath and a speaker button to hear it. The Details panel gives the meaning, part of speech, the traditional form, and a pronunciation guide that breaks the word into syllables and tones — zhōng (1st tone) + guó (2nd tone). Scroll on for example sentences, each with its own audio.

Swipe left and right to move through the lesson without going back to the list. The play button in the top-right auto-advances through the whole lesson hands-free. The heart saves the word; the graduation-cap icon adds it to your teaching list.

Sentences

Nearly 2,000 example sentences, graded by HSK level and each with audio and a translation. Sentences can be hearted just like words, and they show up under their own My Favorites entry at the top of the level list.

Article reader

Thirty-three graded readings, written to stay inside the vocabulary of their level. Tap any sentence to hear just that sentence, which makes it easy to loop the one line you cannot follow instead of restarting the whole passage.

Practice tests

Choose Reading or Listening, then a level, then a specific test. An instructions screen explains the format before you start. Tests are timed and scored, and your result is saved to My Learning Progress in Profile so you can watch a level improve over several attempts.

Games

Tone Trainer — hear a word, pick its tone. Timed Quiz — match meaning to character before the clock runs out, with a combo multiplier for streaks. Listening Match — hear a word, pick the character. Sentence Match — hear a sentence, pick it out of four. They pull from the levels you have been studying, so they double as revision.

Tone Trainer

Tones are the single hardest thing for most learners, and the only cure is volume. Tone Trainer plays a syllable and asks you to pick first, second, third, fourth or neutral. A few minutes a day here does more for your listening than an hour of reading.

Flash cards

A quick flip-through of a level or of your favorites, with no scoring and no scheduling. Use this when you want to skim a lot of words quickly; use Review on the Home card when you want the app to decide what you actually need to see.

Pinyin practice

Drills the initial (the opening consonant), the final (the rest of the syllable) and the tone separately, so you can find out which of the three is actually letting you down. There is a play-first option in Profile that plays the audio before showing you the answer, which turns this into a listening exercise rather than a reading one.

Achievements

Badges unlock as you hit streaks, XP thresholds and study milestones. On a brand-new install they are all locked, exactly as shown here. They exist to give the daily goal something to build towards — nothing in the app is gated behind them.

Profile & settings

My Language switches the language your translations appear in — English, Spanish, Japanese, Korean or Vietnamese. My Settings holds the daily goal and the auto-play options. Voice Play Setting lets you choose a specific installed voice and set the playback speed. Further down you will find Content Statistics (how much is in the app), My Learning Progress (your test results), the Remove Ads purchase, and the app version you will need if you ever email us.