Best Apps for Learning Chinese Characters and Words
Pleco Chinese Dictionary is an all-in-one Chinese dictionary/flashcard/document reading app that is available for iPhone and Android.
Pleco is our favorite app, and it’s a must-have for anyone who’s learning Chinese. No matter if you’re a beginner or an advanced learner, you will find Pleco a great companion as your vocabulary grows.
Pleco's free basic version includes our full dictionary search engine, a couple of very nice dictionaries. From our experience, the free version is powerful enough and should suit most people’s learning needs.
Many additional features are available as paid in-app purchases. Consider Pleco to be more like an e-book store – some books are free, while others require payment.
Anki
Anki is a program that helps you remember things easily. Because it is far more efficient than traditional study methods, you can either significantly reduce the amount of time you spend studying or significantly increase the amount you learn.
Anki can help anyone who needs to remember things in their daily lives. The possibilities are endless because it is content-agnostic and supports images, audio, videos, and scientific markup (via LaTeX).
Flashcards that are designed for long-term retention. We recommend downloading the computer version (which is free!) rather than the iPhone app (rather pricey).
You can use Anki to
Learn a language
Study for medical and law exams
Memorize people's names and faces
Brush up on geography
Master long poems
practice guitar chords
KTdict C-E
KTdict C-E is an easy-to-use and fast Chinese dictionary with reader and flashcards. A perfect tool for your study of the Chinese language or your visit to China. No subscription and no internet connection are required. Runs on iPhone, Apple Watch, and iPad.
Some KTdict C-E features:
Its search uses English/German/French, Chinese characters, and Hanyu Pinyin. You can also use Chinese handwriting recognition or voice input of iOS to enter Chinese easily.
Its reader function allows you to import Chinese texts and get with a single tap translation of unknown words and characters.
You can also take pictures of printed Chinese texts and use optical character recognition to help with translation.
Flashcards: Add words from the dictionary to vocabulary lists and share them across your iOS devices with iCloud. Import vocabulary lists from .csv files (e. g. Numbers or EXCEL).