The best AI apps to practice speaking Mandarin Chinese

What you need to practice speaking Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin has a reputation, and it’s half deserved. In our ranking of 67 languages it’s the third hardest for English speakers (8,582 effort points), after Japanese and Cantonese.

But look at where the work is. The grammar is light: no verb endings, no genders. The work is characters and words, and almost none of them look like anything you already know. So you need a few things a Spanish learner doesn’t.

• Pinyin, until you don’t need itYou can’t sound out a character. Pinyin writes it in Latin letters, with its tone: 你好 is nǐ hǎo. You want it above the characters while you talk, and a switch to turn it off later.
• Tones you can hearMandarin has four tones plus a neutral one, and mā, má, mǎ and mà are four different words. The quickest fix: say your sentence, then hear a native speaker say the same one.
• Words that stickThere are no lookalike words to lean on. What helps is seeing how a word is built: 电脑, a computer, is an “electric brain”. Once you see that, you don’t forget it.
• Simplified or TraditionalMainland China and Singapore write Simplified. Taiwan and Hong Kong write Traditional. Practice the one you’ll actually read.
• A way to see your progressMost learners measure themselves in HSK levels. It helps to know where you are, without sitting an exam.
• Lots of Chinese you understandSpeaking activates the words you have. New words and characters come from input: videos, podcasts and texts where you already understand most of it.
• Lots of speaking timeKnowing characters doesn’t make you speak. Talking does, for hours. A few minutes a day won’t get you there.

A complete fluency system, not just a speaking app

Our speaking practice is the heart of Teacher AI. But speaking alone won’t make you fluent, and neither will input alone. You need both, and you need to see it working. With Mandarin that matters even more: almost no word looks like anything you know, so you need to meet each one many times.

So Teacher AI is a complete fluency system. Input grows your Mandarin. Speaking activates it. And we track every word along the way, to get you to real fluency as fast as we can.

1. Step 1Input grows your vocabularyWatch any Chinese YouTube video or podcast, and read stories written at your level, with pinyin above every word. You always see how much you already understand, and every word you tap becomes a flashcard. How Watch and Read work.
2. Step 2Speaking activates itRecognizing a word isn’t the same as saying it, with the right tone, without thinking. Talking with your teacher, for as long as you like, is how words move from “I know that one” to “I just said it”. Every mistake gets fixed, with a Why?.
3. Step 3We track every word, and your HSK levelYour passive words are the ones you understand when you read or hear them. Your active words are the ones you’ve used yourself. You see both grow, how your time splits between input and output, and your estimated HSK level: the share of each level’s words you know, and the characters you can read.

Brand new to Mandarin? Start somewhere else first. Teacher AI works best from about A2, once you can handle simple everyday sentences. Before that, you just don’t have enough words yet for open conversation. So learn the basics with SuperChinese, Speak or Duolingo, which all teach Mandarin from zero, and come back when you want to talk.

What it looks like in Mandarin Chinese

Here’s what a moment of practice looks like. Your teacher writes pinyin above every word, and if you made a mistake, your sentence gets fixed right there.

Every word broken into its characters

Tap any word, and its card shows you the characters it’s made of: each one with its pinyin and its own meaning, plus one line on how they add up to the word.

A word of one character gets broken into its parts. And a word borrowed for its sound tells you where the sound came from. That’s how characters stop being random shapes.

An illustration of three word cards, rebuilt for this page. On the real card, the wording depends on the word. Below: real screenshots of the web app.

Meet your Mandarin teachers

Five teachers: Lin from Hangzhou, Mei from Taipei, Xiaoling from Beijing, Xiaoming from Shenzhen, and Xiaoma from New York, the YouTuber behind Xiaomanyc and one of our co-founders. The same five teach Traditional Chinese.

• 
  Lin Chen

  Hangzhou · Chinese
• 
  Mei Liu

  Taipei · Taiwanese
• 
  Xiaoling Wang

  Beijing · Chinese
• 
  Xiaoma

  New York City · American

  Xiaomanyc
• 
  Xiaoming Wang

  Shenzhen · Chinese

Input: Chinese to watch and read, at your level

Here’s the input side up close. New words and characters come from lots of Mandarin you hear and read, where you already understand most of it.

Watch and Read are on the web app for now, with pinyin above every word. Words you read along with, without tapping, count toward your passive words. Every word you tap lands in your flashcards. And when you’re done, you talk about it with your teacher.

• Any YouTube videoPaste a link to a Chinese YouTube video or an Apple Podcasts episode. We turn it into a page you read along with, pinyin above every word, new words in yellow. No subtitles? On a paid plan, we transcribe it for you.
• Stories written for youRead writes texts at your level, about anything you like, and suggests ideas from what you talk about with your teacher. Or import your own: an article, a book, a photo of a page.
• How much you know, before you startTeacher AI keeps a list of every Chinese word you’ve met: the ones you use when you talk, the ones you read or hear, the ones you tap. Chinese has no spaces, so it cuts the text into words first. Then it checks every word against your list and shows you the share you already know.
• The 80% rulePick videos and texts where you know 80% or more of the words. Then your brain fills in the rest from context. Under 70% is too much for now. 90% and up is easy and fun.
• Suggestions that fitNot sure what to watch? Suggested for you lists new videos from Chinese channels we picked, by topic, each with the share you’d understand.
• Then talk about itOne tap on Talk about this starts a conversation about what you just watched or read. Retelling it is how new words become words you can say.

Teacher AI or Duolingo?

Lots of people start Chinese on Duolingo. So here’s how the two compare for speaking, with every Duolingo fact from Duolingo’s own pages.

The apps side by side

The apps, one by one

Where another app might suit you better

Head-to-head comparisons

Teacher AI vs Speak · Teacher AI vs Langua · Teacher AI vs Talkpal · Teacher AI vs Praktika · Teacher AI vs Duolingo. All comparisons.

Other languages

SpanishSpain and Latin AmericaFrenchFrance, Belgium and SwitzerlandCantoneseHong Kong, with JyutpingThaiWith spaces between words, and Paiboon+ or IPAJapaneseWith furigana or romaji, and a kanji countDutchThe Netherlands and Flanders, with Flemish voicesBrazilian PortugueseWith Brazilian teachers and well-known polyglotsItalianWith Italian teachers from Podcast Italiano and Vaporetto ItalianoGermanWith German and Austrian teachers, from Lingster Academy to Herr AntrimEuropean PortugueseWith teachers from Lisbon, Porto, Coimbra and Faro, and Portuguese With LeoEnglishWith American and British teachers, from Espresso English to English Like A NativeKoreanWith teachers from Seoul and Busan, and every dropped 요 fixedRussianWith the stress marked above every wordTurkishWith Can from Turkishle, and every ending fixed as you talkArabicWith teachers from Cairo, Amman and Jeddah, and a straight answer on MSA or dialectPolishWith teachers from Warsaw, and every case ending fixedSwedishPitch accent, en or ett, and nobody switching to EnglishIndonesianWith teachers from Bali and Bandung, for the Indonesian people actually speakHindiWith teachers from Delhi, Jaipur and Mumbai, and every missing ने fixedRomanianWith teachers from Bucharest and Transylvania, and every ending explainedCatalanFor when Barcelona keeps answering you in SpanishVietnameseWith teachers from Hanoi and Sapa, and every tone, classifier and pronoun fixedUkrainianWith two teachers from Lviv, and every case fixed as you talkGreekWith teachers from Crete and Thessaloniki, and every gender and ending explainedHebrewFor Hebrew without the vowels, with two teachers from Tel AvivCzechWith Klara and Lukáš from Brno, and a Why? on every case ending