Dong Chinese - Learn Mandarin

Peter Olson

About this app

Learn new words in their full context through thousands of real example sentences, captioned images, songs, and videos.

Understand the building blocks of Chinese characters through full explanations of their component parts and etymology.

Keep track of your progress over time, and find new content appropriate for your level.

Ratings and reviews

I only rely on this app for the dictionary since I've heard that some contributors have fixed a lot of common folk or disproved etymologies. But the UX is a little finicky. Like, navigation via the top left hamburger menu is unergonomic. Also, if there is some characters leftover in the search bar from a previous time I used, it will look it up again, and if I press X, it will look it up again without letting me edit. I have to specifically press "OK".

This app is AMAZING! Beautifully programmed and easy to use, it incorporates reading, writing, listening, and speaking modalities along with cultural and historical resources. It is an absolute game-changer for working on characters. I literally cried when I saw what I could write after just a few weeks of practice. I have worked on multiple languages using all sorts of resources. I can say that this app is the most helpful I have ever encountered.

It's similar to ClozeMaster but includes a lot more features and it aggregates lots of Chinese audio/video content to supplement the vocab learning, which is totally unique. The dictionary is similar and sometimes better than the Outlier dictionary on Pleco. I wish the sentence audio was better than the standard TTS. I also wish I could turn of the AI Challenger sentences because they feel lower quality, especially for beginner levels. But totally worth it!