Best Android App for learning Chinese

[Ness]

Hey there. I'm realitively new to learning Chinese. I've been studying it on and off for the past couple of years. Now I have a good amount of time to really crack down and start getting on track again, hopefully finishing what I started.

In any case, I recently got a smartphone that runs on Android. I'm sure there are a lot apps for learning Chiense out there, however I was wondering if there was one that might fit my specific needs that you folks may know about.

Even though I'm realitvely a beginner, I do know a good amount of the nuances of Chinese due to my two previous years of on and off study. The thing that REALLY bothers me for some reason is sentence structure/grammar. Which words go where basically. Pretty much everyone I've encountered over the last couple of years has assured me that the most important thing to focus on is tone. I understand that, but at the same time tone I know how to practice and get better at. Same with vocab and characters. But sentence structure and placement of words, adverbs, verbs, particles, whatever...I just don't understand. I can't get better if I don't know how. And this has always been a problem for me. I do have notes on "basic sentence structure" I learned a while back:

adj (time) + subject - adverb - verb - adj + object - particle

Even that formula I'm confused at times because I know it changes based on the context of a given situation. Let me put it this way. I was born in America, I know English, but I really don't know how it works that well. Honestly beyond knowing what a verb, adjective, and noun are for certain...I'm a little hazy on everything else just within my own language.

I purchased a book I have yet to study at the suggestion of a member or two on this forum titled "Chinese The Easy Way", which I believe focuses more on sentence structure/grammar. So I'll finally get around to checking that out. I don't think it even has characters in it.

However, I ask if there are any apps that may help me in this case specifically. I'm sure I can find all of the popular ones too that help with flashcards, vocab, whatever. So any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks a lot.

[lechuan]

Most of the "learn chinese" android apps I tried were all pretty lame. The only exception I found was dictionaries. "Pleco", which is awesome; and many also like hanping.

I never found anything that will help you specifically with grammar, I'd suggest getting a good book and working through it. If you really wanted something on your android, you could always get a Grammar E-book. I like "Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar" by Claudia Ross personally. All examples are in pinyin, simplified and traditional characters.

[Ness]

Yeah I decided to try Pieco, which seems pretty useful for the couple of hours I've spent with it so far. I may upgrade to the non-free version.

[Demonic_Duck]

I can testify that Hanping is also great, plus the "pro" upgrade only costs peanuts, whereas Pleco can be quite expensive depending on which options you want. I also downloaded an app called QQ慧眼, which is basically a free OCR app that works with Chinese characters (as Hanping doesn't have one). However, I'm pretty sure it's not half as good as Pleco's.

Those and Anki are the only apps I use at present for Chinese learning, but if there are other useful ones I'm all ears.

[imron]

whereas Pleco can be quite expensive depending on which options you want

It can be quite expensive, but the more important question is whether you are getting value for money or not. I've been using it now for 5 years, which has included free upgrades from different versions and also different platforms, so the total cost works out to a few cents a day, which for me is more than worth it.

[Demonic_Duck]

It can be quite expensive, but the more important question is whether you are getting value for money or not. I've been using it now for 5 years, which has included free upgrades from different versions and also different platforms, so the total cost works out to a few cents a day, which for me is more than worth it.

I don't doubt that Pleco is worth it, but Hanping is also a very respectable option at a fraction of the cost. I intend to purchase Pleco's basic bundle when I'm on a bit less of a restricted budget, though.

[外国赤佬]

@imron. Yes, but then again, is Pleco really worth it? The times have changed. Nowadays, there are so many free alternatives. Even if we don't count the various legally grey dictionary front-ends (which let you run pretty much any electronic dictionary database), then there are also many free, perfectly legal ones, like e.g. 有道词典 (offers both online and offline access to 21st Century E-C, Collins E-C & C-E, 新汉英大辞典 dictionaries, etc). If you want flashcards, Anki does it better and for free. Pleco's OCR is also not unique, it's licensed (like everything else that Pleco offers), many big companies (like Tencent, SOSO, DoCoMo and many others) offer the very same technology for free. The Pleco guys even ask money for the handwriting input, which is really silly, because there are so many excellent free alternatives.

[creamyhorror]

I found an Android app that's really useful as an ebook reader with dictionary lookup: ZO Reader. It's a simple e-reader, but the crucial thing is that it allows you to tap words to look them up in StarDict dictionaries. After that you can add the word to your list, which is viewable as 'flashcards' with dictionary definitions, and can be exported as a webpage. I've been happily using it for a week or so, and the only complaint I have is the limited font size for dictionary definitions (which I fixed with a bit of hacking). I'm much happier with it than I was with my old e-reader on my iPhone, which didn't offer StarDict tap-lookup. It's free of charge.

I recommend it to anyone who uses StarDict dictionaries and is looking for an e-reader app with tap-lookup similar to Pleco.

[imron]

The times have changed. Nowadays, there are so many free alternatives

I don't have or use the OCR so for me that's neither here nor there. Likewise E-C or C-E dictionaries don't interest me, although obviously I realise these are important when starting out with the language. With that aside, anyway, yes there are many different free alternatives for each of the different features that Pleco has and you've listed a whole bunch in your post. What Pleco does is integrate them in a single package. So I look up a word in my C-C dictionary, and add it to my flashcard list at the push of a button, and spend zero time on flashcard maintenance.

When Anki comes with 有道词典 integration it might be a different story, but in the meantime Pleco still offers plenty of value. Unlike the other alternatives, it was also designed with Chinese learners as its target audience, which is something none of those other programs do. This actually makes a big difference in terms of ease of use and reduction of effort.

[mikelove]

Don't know how this turned into a Pleco thread since OP was specifically asking for sentence-based learning tools (which aren't something we currently claim to offer), but anyway:

@Demonic_Duck - our free app is actually pretty comparable to their paid one feature-wise, particularly with the current free handwriting promo (which will very likely be extended, since we'd like to use it to drive sales for some of the next batch of new dictionaries). And they charge about as much for their add-ons as we do.

@外国赤佬 - Integration, polish, and legality are the primary things we've been offering since the beginning - our first Palm OS app in 2001 was a wrapper of a higher-quality-but-not-much-larger-than-CEDICT dictionary with integrated handwriting and Chinese character display support (and not much else), all of which were also available in separate apps; we were just a little faster / better for Pinyin searches and our handwriting recognizer incorporated the Chinese-learner-friendly feature of replacing an un-cancel-able delay-before-recognition timer with a big friendly "Recognize" button. On Windows Mobile there were a number of free Chinese OSes and Chinese handwriting input systems, and even the same wide variety of free apps for viewing pirated StarDict dictionaries. So if the possibility of cobbling together most of our product's basic feature list from other, cheaper apps made Pleco unnecessary then we'd have gone out of business 5 years ago.

We give away licensed dictionaries for free too, we just pick different ones because we're optimizing around English speakers learning Chinese instead of Chinese speakers learning English - 21世纪 is a bit on the advanced side for many Chinese learners, so rather than amortizing those royalties over a lot of cheap / free users we charge more for it and limit it to a smaller number. (though 有道's version actually seems to be missing a lot of entries - it is a bit more nicely formatted, but we're working on that) So instead we give away a heavily-revised version of 《汉英词典》 from 外研社 with lots of example sentences and detailed definitions in our free app - something a typical Chinese learner is likely to find much more useful. There are all sorts of things we do much better than those other apps simply because we're optimizing around different people - type the string "raner" into 有道 and you get a bunch of random 'r' English words, type it into even our free app and you immediately get the entry for 然而 with examples.

有道 has actually raised the hackles of several of the publishers they do business with (I know, I talk to them) for giving away their dictionaries for free - not doing any favors for their print sales - so some of that free collection may not be sustainable long-term, but even if it is I'd happily pit our collection of dictionaries against those in any other legal app; you certainly won't find any legal free copies of ABC or Oxford, let alone of our next round of new dictionaries, several of which didn't exist in electronic format at all until we digitized them (and several others of which have never shown up legally in a mobile app before).

We do license our OCR algorithm - the English-speaker-learning-Chinese market isn't really big enough to support the development of an OCR system just for them - but I don't believe there are any other Android apps using the same one, and there's a great deal of support code (motion detection, weighted averages of multiple frames of results, getting buggy manufacturer camera drivers to behave themselves, etc) that we developed ourselves. And again, they're not really optimizing around Chinese speakers learning English. At the moment, we're actually giving away handwriting in our Android app for free as a promotional tool, but the only other Android app using the recognition algorithm we licensed for handwriting does charge for it. (in fact, we had to specifically agree to limit our free handwriting to Chinese dictionary use and not offer it as a general-purpose IME in order to avoid competing with that app) I certainly won't apologize for the fact that we license stuff from other companies - it's not cheap, particularly not when you're a little company like Pleco and not a Chinese internet giant like Tencent or Baidu, but it makes possible a lot of things that we wouldn't be able to do on our own.

But as far as the "worth it" argument, our free Android app has (as the moment) a) handwriting b) licensed example-laden C-E dictionary *and* CC-CEDICT c) really awesome search engine d) unlimited word lists with other-flashcard-program-friendly text file export e) basic flashcards f) basic audio (syllable-by-syllable anyway) g) document reading from clipboard and from "Send" ing web pages h) no ads (not even ads-that-you-can-turn-off-with-a-checkbox); none of these other solutions you've talked about come anywhere close to that. You can argue about whether it's worth paying for all of the various add-ons (though a lot of people certainly think so), but if you honestly think that a Chinese learner is better off with 有道's free app than with ours then you clearly haven't spent much time around Chinese learners.

[Demonic_Duck]

@Demonic_Duck - our free app is actually pretty comparable to their paid one feature-wise, particularly with the current free handwriting promo (which will very likely be extended, since we'd like to use it to drive sales for some of the next batch of new dictionaries). And they charge about as much for their add-ons as we do.

I do also own the free Pleco app with handwriting, and the main reason I use Hanping is familiarity, plus the fact that they have a nifty little "Chinese word of the day" widget which I don't think Pleco does (in all honesty I'm not sure how useful the widget actually is in terms of teaching new vocab, but it looks nice on my homescreen and doubles up as a link to the app).

[laurenth]

@OP This thread may be interesting

[Lost in Mong Kok]

Probably won't help with grammar, but eStroke is quite a good app for learning characters and practicing stroke order.

Anki has always been a good start for character learning too and it may have some more advanced packs which deal with grammar - I'm not sure.

As for actual learning apps I've never encountered any that are worth mentioning.

I'm just starting to use Pleco having been a regular user of Hangping but with Plecos implimentation of OCR it seems like a better choice or my needs at the moment. I do prefer Hangping as a dictionary though but I don't know why. I just seem to find myself wanting to go back to it from Pleco. Well worth the money for the Pro version.

The problem with Pleco and Hangping for me is that they don't support Cantonese (at the moment) and using dictionaries through StarDict etc just isn't the same.