Babu — A Classy App for Learning Chinese

This app, available on iOS and Android, is a pretty much effective yet very gentle & caring tutor of Mandarin Chinese. It allows users to practice language skills at their own pace, starting from the very beginning and going ahead with progressively more sophisticated structures — from characters through vocabulary to sentences.

The learning process is based on flashcards, which a user studies by spaced repetition.

Each flashcard, presenting a piece of new information (a character, a word or a sentence) provides:

• its transcription;
• translation into English;
• animation, which demonstrates how to write it step-by-step;
• usage examples;
• opportunity to hear it spoken;
• tone guide, illustrating the pronunciation with a simplified scheme image.

After acquaintance with yet another portion of cards, the user proceeds with exercises, allowing to test his knowledge: reading comprehension, listening comprehension and tone memory. The Android app, beyond that, allows to practice writing skills, using the device as a writing pad.

Every time the user closes the app, his progress is saved, and he could turn back to learning at any moment.

While the basic version of the app is available for free, its version without ads as well as vocabulary for advanced learning with Finance, Medicine and Law glossaries are available only under subscription.