What is HelloChinese?
HelloChinese is a Mandarin-only app with short lessons built around HSK levels. It combines matching and listening games, native-speaker videos, speech recognition for tones and a separate characters course, plus a large library of graded stories.
The basic course is free with ads. Premium unlocks the full course and review tools, and a higher Premium+ tier adds more video and immersion content.
What HelloChinese does well
For the first year of Mandarin it is hard to beat. The lessons are well paced, the speech recognition gives useful feedback on tones, and you can switch between simplified and traditional characters.
The graded stories are a real strength: short texts at your level are exactly what beginners need to move from single words to reading.
Where HelloChinese falls short
Reviewers consistently note that the content gets thinner after HSK 3. Handwriting is mostly tracing and is not scheduled for review, and grammar notes become lighter as the course progresses.
The best video content requires Premium+, so the full experience is noticeably more expensive than the headline Premium price.
How MandarinChineseSystem.com compares
MandarinChineseSystem.com covers the full HSK 1–6 word lists — more than 5,600 words — with characters, traditional forms, pinyin and audio, all free. Interval Study uses the FSRS algorithm, which schedules each word individually based on how well you remember it.
Every character has its own page with stroke order and radicals, and you can practise writing and print worksheets. The 240 graded articles run from HSK 1 to HSK 6, each with pinyin, an English and a literal word-by-word translation and a short quiz. There is no speech recognition and no native app.
The verdict: which should you choose?
HelloChinese is an excellent starting app and worth its subscription for many beginners. Use MandarinChineseSystem.com alongside it for free vocabulary review, writing practice and reading — and especially once you move beyond HSK 3.