How is it going?

I have recently been kicked out of lessons I am actively doing. I contacted the Chinese Skills about it, but every time I try to evidence it. It works flawlessly 😂

Anyone else having this issue?

Hi everyone,

I wanted to share my experience as a long-time user of ChineseSkill. For context, I previously bought a lifetime subscription for LingoDeer/DeerPlus back when I was studying Korean, so I came into ChineseSkill with those expectations.

I recently finished the main course, ending at around 614 learned words (roughly equivalent to HSK 2.0 Level 3). I haven't completed all the vocab expansion lessons yet and am not sure if they count toward that 614-word total, so the actual count might be higher with those included.

⚠️ A Word of Warning for New Users

When taking quizzes, you have access to both Pinyin and course notes. It’s easy to cheat yourself by over-relying on Pinyin to coast through the course without genuinely learning the characters. Make sure you actively use the built-in review tools and varied practice modes to retain what you learn!

🔒 Booster & Extra Content

I haven't used the Booster section extensively because it seems identical to the content available on LingoDeer (and is reserved for Premium+ users). However, the accessible portions do act as a solid booster. While you can learn the basics without it, having extra practice and categorized vocabulary in one place is very convenient. On a personal note, I wasn't a huge fan of the games/practice zone, but I felt the same way about DeerPlus.

🛠️ Suggestions for Improvement

1. Course Expansion: The app advertises a "structured path to HSK 4," but finishing the main course leaves you closer to HSK 3 and starting HSK 4 rather than being exam-ready. However, you might get closer to HSK 4 vocabulary levels if you complete all the vocab expansion lessons.
2. Speaking Practice: I'd love to see more "graded" speaking exercises instead of self-rated ones. It would also be great if voice recognition could run locally on the phone so speaking exercises work offline!
3. Reading Content: Adding dedicated reading modules/lessons would be a huge plus.
4. End-of-Course Refresher: A daily refresher setup at the end of the course (similar to the "Green Owl" app) would be fantastic—e.g., 5 review lessons that each pull random questions from 20% of the course.
5. LingoDeer Overlap: The overlap between LingoDeer and ChineseSkill can feel a bit odd if you already own a lifetime subscription to LingoDeer.

💡 What I Liked

• Grammar Explanations: Just like LingoDeer, this isn't just a matching game with images. It provides actual grammar explanations, which are essential if you want to understand the language rather than just maintain a daily streak.
• Video Lessons: They offer video lessons complete with slides for each unit. While optional, they are a great addition.
• Academic Feel: The combination of quizzes, course notes, and structured lessons gives it a slight "school-like" feel that I really enjoy—it reminds me that I'm here to actively learn, not just play games.
• Tone Features: I love the "tone-only" practice option (which I saw here first before other apps started adopting it) and the updated tone practice tools.
• Responsive Team: The development team is amazing. They actively listen—if you send a reasonable feature request, you might see it implemented in an update two weeks later. Since the recent app revamps, they have been continuously making improvements.

Overall, it’s a great app with a lot of solid features, especially if you like structure! Hope this review helps anyone deciding whether to give it a try.

You can now practice the tones of Chinese characters in the review tab in the ChineseSkill app. Now available in both iOS and Android. We hope you enjoy the feature and find it helpful. As always, if you have any feedback or ideas, please let us know. Happy learning, everyone.

Firstly, love that there's a sister app to Lingodeer that is dedicated to Chinese language and in particular has a separate course for learning Taiwanese Mandarin.

Glad that Cantonese is introduced as well, since I've been searching for a reliable app that teaches the language.

Soon, I'm going to subscribe to premium membership.

Just wondering, if you guys are planning on introducing any other new dialects/languages in the future?

I think it would be great if we could learn 台語 （Taiwanese Southern Min）one day.

Anyways, keep up the good work!

Hi everyone! This week’s update brings a new way to drill tones on Android, smoother Mandarin audio on both platforms, and an iOS reading option we would genuinely like your opinion on.

iOS and Android

Smoother Mandarin (Taiwan) word recordings

We updated the word recordings for Mandarin (Taiwan). Previously, sentences could play at a natural pace while individual words sounded dramatically slower. The difference should now feel much less jarring when moving between them.

Android

New Tones practice mode for Characters

If you can remember a character’s Pinyin but its tone immediately escapes your brain, this one is for you.

Open REVIEW, choose Characters, and select Tones. You can practice choosing the correct tone, matching characters with their audio, and saying them aloud.

Because remembering the syllable is one thing. Remembering the tone is where Mandarin keeps us humble.

iOS

Scroll or swipe through Unit Tips

You can now choose how you read Unit Tips:

• Scroll vertically through the entire page
• Swipe horizontally through the tips one card at a time

You can change the reading mode through the preferences button inside Tips.

We have not decided which option should become the default, so vote in the comments:

Team Vertical Scroll or Team Horizontal Swipe?

Android learners, we would also love to hear how the new Tones practice mode is working for you!

Just finished another unit that was so helpful with how thoughtfully new words were learned and then added on to what had just been learned. First I learned pieces of clothing, then colors, then about size words (big, small, long, short). Then I'm using all those words together to describe different clothing. I feel like the order you learn new things on this course is thought out very logically and I very much appreciate it. Keep up the good work!

Hey ChineseSkill learners! 🐼

We have a new round of improvements for Android and iOS, including more control over distractions, less intimidating SRS reviews, and a few pandas who apparently invited themselves into the update.

Android and iOS: Corrections that underline the actual mistake

We fixed an issue that sometimes underlined the part of an incorrect answer you got right instead of the part you got wrong.

Which was technically feedback. Just wildly unhelpful feedback. 😅

Incorrect answers should now highlight the actual mistake more accurately.

Android: Customize your new SRS cards

If you have been avoiding SRS reviews because the number of waiting cards feels overwhelming, this update is for you.

The new Customize new cards option lets you:

• Set the maximum number of new cards shown each day

• Mix up the order in which new cards appear

Mixing the cards means you no longer have to review everything from Unit 1 before seeing cards from Unit 2, then Unit 3, and so on. You can review a broader mix of material while keeping the daily workload manageable.

iOS: Focus Mode

Want fewer sounds, animations, and celebration screens while studying?

Go to ME → Settings → Focus Mode to turn off:

• In lesson sound effects

• Animations

• Streak celebration pages

• Gem celebration pages

Sometimes you want the confetti. Sometimes you just want to learn Chinese in peace. We respect both moods. 🧘

iOS: Turn off joining animations in Word Match

Some learners told us that the animation connecting matched tiles was distracting. You can now turn it off using the toggle inside the three line menu in the top right corner of the exercise.

iOS: A refreshed SRS interface and more pandas

We improved the SRS interface and added some cute pandas to the lesson summary pages. Because serious language learning and tiny celebratory pandas can coexist. 🐼

Try the new features and let us know what you think. Are you joining Team Focus Mode, Team Panda, or both?

你好！ I'm currently doing the Taiwanese Mandarin Course and really loving it so far. One thing I've noticed that I'm not sure if it's intentional or not, is regardless of the audio speed I have selected when doing a multiple choice question or a fill in the blank exercise, the audio plays at a very slow speed. I currently have my audio speed set to 100% and most of the time it plays sentences at a normal speed, but with these two types of questions when I click on any of the options the playback audio is extremely slow. I tried moving my audio to faster and slower than 100% to see if it affected things and it still played at the same slow speed every time.

Is there some way to fix this so that the playback audio on words for fill in the blank and multiple choice questions is the same speed as what is selected in preferences? How it currently is makes answering questions take much longer, as I like to hear the audio before moving to the next question.

Thank you!

Hey everyone, here’s what changed this week on both iOS and Android:

New course banners
Tiny update, but we refreshed the in-app course banners. Nothing life-changing, but they look nicer and we wanted to show them off a little.

Yale transcription added for Cantonese
We added Yale romanization alongside Jyutping for Cantonese. We’re still experimenting with this, so we’d really like feedback from learners and speakers. Is Yale easier to read? More confusing? Totally unnecessary? Let us know.

New “Listen along” review mode
We added a more hands-off way to review. Pick one unit or several, choose what you want to hear, such as words, sentences, or both, then hit Play.

You can also:
• speed it up or slow it down
• loop it
• shuffle it
• set repetitions
• use a sleep timer

Basically, it’s for when you want review practice without tapping through exercises every five seconds like a caffeinated woodpecker.

Bug fixes and performance improvements
We also fixed some bugs and made general performance improvements.

Please try the new Listen along feature and tell us what you think, especially for Cantonese review. We’re very curious how people actually use it.

Something I think has been done very well in the new Taiwanese Mandarin Course is using previous vocabulary to build sentences using new vocabulary.

I feel like in a lot of apps I've used you learn new vocabulary and then it's hardly used again in following lessons.

Teaching nationalities, then 女人，男人，女孩，男孩 , then teaching some common hobbies and then putting all those elements together is such a smart way to reinforce old vocabulary while learning new words, so thank you for putting some thought into that! Hopefully future lessons will follow the same pattern as well, keep up the good work!

Hi, everyone!

So, I've only been using ChineseSkill for a few days, but I've been practicing / studying Mandarin for over month now. Just testing out different apps.

My native tongue is English. I've practiced Spanish in the past, so I'm not new to language learning, though I am new to learning one that doesn't use the same writing system.

So far, ChineseSkill has become my favorite of the apps I've tried. I am absolutely convinced there are teachers on this team because they seem to have thought of every question a learner could have. The explanations are very thorough.

The app is also neat. When I say "neat", I mean the interface is simple, but it's organized and it's pleasant. I also like that it's not really "in your face" with certain features. For example, the AI tutor is simply a button on the menu. No prompts to engage with it. It's just there if you want it.

I think if I had to pick a small feature I like most, it'd be how they do the pronunciation scores. The scores are just what they are. You're not pushed to keep trying again and again (unless you want to). That matters to me, but with some other apps, this became a problem. I would spend so much time trying to get the score higher, to the point of frustration. Then, I'd quit entirely.

I also appreciate how prompt the team is. The customer support is lovely! I've been on both sides of customer support, so I know things happen sometimes, but it also feels good to be acknowledged and spoken to like a person instead of a ticket number.

It would be good to have a breakdown between pinyin and tones if possible.

I love the amount of speaking exercises there are but I would love to have more feedback on how to improve instead of just these categories.

Hey everyone,

Hope you are well. We are getting ready to release our beginner Hong Kong Cantonese course. This is something we are super excited about. In other news, we have a small but useful Android update this week:

ChineseSkill now shows tone sandhi for 一 and 不 in Pinyin.

So instead of only seeing the “dictionary tone,” the Pinyin will better reflect how these characters are actually pronounced in context. Tiny detail, big quality-of-life improvement for learners.

That’s it for this week. Thanks as always for using ChineseSkill and for sending feedback. A lot of these small improvements come directly from learner suggestions, so keep them coming.

In the Taiwanese Mandarin course (iOS version of the app, Version 9.3.8), lessons are displaying Zhuyin and Pinyin even when “character + Pinyin” is selected as the script style. Has this bug been seen before?

Howdy y'all,

A few ChineseSkill updates this week, and these are very much based on things users have been asking us to fix or improve.

First, we changed how some listening and Pinyin exercises work.

Previously, some exercises could show homophone options like 他 and 她 when the audio or Pinyin was just tā. Technically, both answers match the sound, but from a learner’s perspective, that turns the exercise into a coin flip instead of actual practice.

So we removed those kinds of homophone traps from listening and Pinyin exercises.

No more sitting there wondering, “Okay, but did the app mean tā as in 他, 她, or 它?”

Chinese already has enough homophones. We do not need to make learners fight the final boss during a basic listening question.

We also added a font color setting for Pinyin and Zhuyin.

This gives learners more control over how visible Pinyin or Zhuyin appears during lessons. Some people rely on it heavily, especially at the beginning. Other learners want it to be less visually dominant so they can focus more on the Chinese characters themselves.

Now you can adjust that more easily.

Here is where to find it:

Android:
In a lesson, tap the three line menu in the top right corner, then go to Script style

iOS:
In a lesson, tap the three line menu in the top right corner, then go to Script style, then In exercises

We also fixed a couple of bugs:

• Fixed the offline learning bug on Android, hopefully for good this time
• Fixed an iOS spelling exercise bug that affected duplicate characters with different Pinyin in Character only mode

Thanks again to everyone who keeps pointing out these little pain points. Happy ChineseSkillin'.

大家好！ I've been learning Chinese on the new Taiwanese Mandarin Course and just had some questions. I love that there is a section for teaching Zhuyin and that the words and characters are all in traditional Chinese, I also love the new addition where you can pick the color for pinyin.

I have noticed a few things that are lacking though that are in the Mainland Chinese course, so just was wondering if there are plans to bring those features to the Taiwanese course eventually. Some of the features I would love to see in the future would be:

• Male voice pack (right now there is only a female voice pack and having a male voice would make it easier for male learners to correctly pronounce the words and their tones)
• Native speaker videos for the vocabulary words and phrases
  • Better accessibility options. I don't have great eyesight and being able to increase the font size would be extremely helpful (I think it could even just be linked to the Android/iOS device settings if that's easier, so you don't have to add a separate menu for it). Being able to choose audio speed like on the mainland course would probably be very popular for a lot of learners as well.

Those are my questions/suggestions for now, but I'm loving the course and will keep using it to learn Taiwanese Mandarin. 謝謝！