HelloChinese review: price, free version and privacy

Our verdict

HelloChinese is a strong first app for anyone starting Mandarin who wants a guided path through pinyin, characters and speaking. Learners who need Cantonese, or who want to know exactly what is free before committing, should look elsewhere first.

What HelloChinese is

HelloChinese is a Mandarin course for beginners that the developer says takes you from scratch to a conversational level. Lessons are game-based and follow HSK levels, starting with a pinyin course, and add speech recognition for pronunciation and handwriting practice for characters. The listing also mentions over 1,000 graded stories and over 2,000 videos with native speakers.

Who it suits

• Beginners learning Mandarin from scratch
• Learners who want listening, speaking, reading and writing in one course

Strengths

• One course covers pinyin, speaking with speech recognition, handwriting and reading, according to the listing.
• Supports both simplified and traditional characters.
• Courses can be downloaded and used offline, and progress syncs across devices.
• Rated 4.9 from about 23,800 ratings and updated in October 2026.
• The privacy label declares no tracking.

Limits

• The listing does not say how much of the course is free.
• Mandarin only; there is no Cantonese course in the listing.
• The price list includes Premium+ items from $19.99 to $149.99 that the description does not explain.
• Five data types are linked to your account, including contact info and usage data.

What the free version does

HelloChinese is free to download, with a Premium subscription. The listing does not say which lessons or features stay free, so expect to meet the paywall at some point in the course.

Price

The description lists HelloChinese Premium at $11.99 for one month, $25.99 for three months and $69.99 for twelve months for US customers. The price list on the US App Store in November 2026 also includes a Premium item at $48.99, Premium+ items from $19.99 to $149.99 and 300 coins at $4.99, none of which the description explains.

Privacy

The privacy label declares no tracking. Purchases, contact info, user content, identifiers and usage data are linked to you; location, usage data, diagnostics and other data are collected without being linked to you.

What the screenshots show

The screenshots show a course map with units such as Introduction, Say hello, Food and Money, and a video exercise where you complete a sentence from tiles that show pinyin above each character.