The best apps to learn Chinese through stories and news

Pick the app that fits your goal

In our comparison, each of these leads on one thing, and none leads on everything. Here's our pick for each goal:

Sources: each app's card below, with its maker's pages. US list prices, checked 7 October 2026.

Use the finder to narrow these down by your level, what you want to read, who voices it and your budget. Its chart sets each library's size against its price:

The cheapest options, paid and free

SayMei Stories is the cheapest monthly plan here, at $2.99.

Among the apps whose makers say people record the audio, Mandarin Bean is free. Of the paid ones, The Chairman's Bao has the lowest monthly price, $11, falling to $6.42 a month on its two-year plan.

Here's what each app costs to read in full:

Sources: each maker's pricing page or US App Store listing, checked 7 October 2026. Maayot's own site publishes no prices, and its App Store listing names only the yearly plan. Readle's App Store listing, checked 8 October 2026, names a quarterly plan at $44.99 and lifetime access at $249.99; it also lists two in-app purchases called "Learn Chinese: Premium", at $12.99 and $69.99, without naming their length. SayMei Stories starts with a 7-day free week that needs a card.

Over a year, SayMei Stories costs $35.88, because it has no yearly plan. Every other subscription here costs more over a year.

Readibu and Mandarin Bean charge only for extras such as offline reading or no ads; the reading itself is free. Their cards below list what Premium costs.

The Chairman's Bao has the biggest library

The Chairman's Bao has the biggest library, with more than 10,500 lessons. Here's how much each app holds, in its maker's own unit:

Sources: each maker's own count, checked 7 October 2026. The Chairman's Bao gives three counts on three pages: 11,086 on its homepage counter, "10,500+" on its lessons page and "9,500+" in the App Store. We use the middle one.

Those are each maker's own units, so we treat the comparison as rough, and you should too. At beginner level, the units are closer than they sound.

The Du Chinese sample chapter we opened has 1 minute 41 seconds of audio, the same as a typical beginner chapter of SayMei Stories. A SayMei dialogue runs a median of just over two minutes.

A Mandarin Companion book is a different thing altogether: about 10,000 characters at Level 1 and 15,000 at Level 2.

Only four of the apps and sites we looked at publish counts by HSK level, including the free Read Mandarin. The rest give a total:

Sources: each maker's site and SayMei's live library, checked 7 October 2026. SayMei Stories levels are marked "about HSK 1–4".

Mandarin Companion splits its 18 books across three levels of its own, from 150 core words up. Du Chinese and The Chairman's Bao publish only their totals, spread across six levels each.

Our Stories stop at about HSK 4, and the top level has 74 chapters.

For news, freshness matters as much as size. The Chairman's Bao says it publishes new lessons daily, and Readle Mandarin says it adds content daily too.

SayMei Dialogues has added exactly five a day, every day for the past two weeks. Most are for beginners: 45 of the 75 added in the past month were at HSK 1.

If you read every day, size and freshness matter more than a few dollars a month.

Half say people record their audio

Six of the twelve say people record their audio. Readibu uses text-to-speech, LingQ gives the lessons you import auto-generated audio, and HelloChinese and Pinyora don't say how theirs is made. Here's how each maker describes its audio:

Sources: each maker's own wording, on its site or US App Store listing, checked 7 October 2026.

Does it matter? We think a trained human reader is the safest model to copy for tones and natural rhythm.

Either way, listen before you pay: Du Chinese's free lessons, The Chairman's Bao's samples and chapter 1 of every SayMei book are all free.

We'd also look for speed control. Du Chinese and The Chairman's Bao have speed controls on their players, and Mandarin Companion recorded its audiobooks slowly, at about 120 characters a minute.

SayMei Stories plays at 0.6 to 1.5 times normal speed and starts a little slower than normal. SayMei Dialogues come with separately slowed audio at three-quarter and half speed, so they slow down without dropping in pitch.

Whichever you choose, listen while you read. In one study, 64 beginners read graded readers for 26 weeks, either silently or with the audio. The group with audio improved more in reading speed and comprehension.

Pictures set the scene but don't teach words

In the free samples we opened, Du Chinese starts its story with a full-width painted illustration. The Chairman's Bao puts a news photo at the top of the lesson, and Mandarin Bean uses a photo.

Mandarin Companion's books have illustrated covers. Every one of the 812 chapters of SayMei Stories is illustrated, and nearly every SayMei dialogue has a picture.

Pictures help a beginner guess what a scene is about before reading it, and they make an app pleasant to come back to. They won't teach you words.

If they matter to you, look at the free samples. To our eyes, Du Chinese's art is the most polished on any public page we opened. Chinese Breeze's print readers are fully illustrated, and so are Pleco's Rainbow Bridge folklore readers.

The apps, one by one

Each card has the maker's own facts and who the app isn't for.

Du Chinese

Stories state their vocabulary base: "I'm a Cat" is written for 150 characters. The Du Chinese library includes Chinese classics such as Journey to the West.

It has 4.9 stars from 4,578 App Store ratings.

The Chairman's Bao

Lessons rewrite the news at levels matched to HSK 1–6, with keywords, grammar notes and exercises. Its Level 1 sample opened without an account, but the audio didn't load for us.

Mandarin Bean

Premium removes the ads and adds exercises and downloads.

Pinyora

Every story is graded against the HSK 3.0 lists.

Mandarin Companion

The 5 Breakthrough books are originals; the other 13 retell classics such as The Secret Garden, with Chinese characters and settings. It leaves pinyin off the text on purpose.

Maayot

Before you start, it shows how well a story fits: "84% known words, 28 new words". On Pro, a teacher corrects your writing and speaking, says its App Store listing.

LingQ

Import articles, books, YouTube videos or podcasts, in more than 50 languages.

Readibu

Open popular Chinese web novels or any web page, or import your own EPUB, PDF or TXT books.

HelloChinese

A complete course app with games, speech recognition and handwriting. Its App Store listing doesn't say who voices the stories, or which plan opens all of them.

Readle Mandarin

From a maker of news-based readers for several languages.

SayMei Stories (ours)

Chinese legends and classic novels such as Mulan and Journey to the West, beside world fairy tales and classics. Every chapter of SayMei Stories ends with five questions.

SayMei Dialogues (ours)

Each dialogue is built from web research on a topic from the past 30 days, lists the articles it drew on, and avoids politics by design. That makes it closer to a conversation about the week's lighter news than to a news article, as our listening practice page shows.

Where SayMei wins and where it loses

Our own apps win on price and free listening. They lose on size and range.

Where it wins:

• Price. At $2.99 a month, SayMei Stories is the cheapest monthly plan for a full story library here.
• Free listening. 3,512 dialogues with transcripts and no account needed is the largest free library we found. Mandarin Bean's 900+ free lessons, recorded by teachers, are the closest.
• New beginner material every day. Five new dialogues a day, most of them at HSK 1.
• Help on the screen. Pinyin over every character, English under every line and audio for every line, by default. Pinyora does the same for free, with 102 stories.
• Free first chapters. Chapter 1 of all 166 books opens with no sign-up.

Where it loses:

• Library. Stories has 812 chapters, while The Chairman's Bao and Du Chinese each hold thousands of readings.
• Level range. Stories stop at about HSK 4.
• News. Dialogues are short conversations about current topics that avoid politics, not news articles. The Chairman's Bao gives you news articles rewritten for your level.
• Platforms. Browser only: no app and no offline reading.
• Grading. By our own measurement, our levels are generous, as the next section shows.
• Track record. Our first books went up in late September 2026.

Graded stories are harder than their labels

To read fiction without help, you need to know about 98% of the words, according to Hu & Nation.

We measured our own books against the official HSK 3.0 word lists. A reader who knows only the HSK words of a book's level knows a median 69.6% of the words in our books at level 1, rising to 88.8% at level 4.

No SayMei book reaches 95% on that measure, which is why every line carries pinyin, English and audio.

Two apps show your fit before you read: Maayot, with its "84% known words", and Literate Chinese, which shows what share of each story you can already read.

Our guide to the science of learning a language through stories explains the 98% rule and lets you test a real story at your level. Not sure of your level? Try the free Chinese level test.

Ten more apps we looked at

These came close, or come up often, but didn't make the comparison:

• Coco: illustrated stories with native Beijing-accent audio and levelled news. It's brand new, with one rating so far, and costs $14.99 a month.
• HSKStory: 175+ stories up to HSK 7–9 on the web, iPhone and Android, for $9.99 a month.
• Todaii: Easy Chinese: news-style reading with words marked by HSK level. It doesn't say how its audio is made.
• Literate Chinese: 650+ graded stories plus easy news, matched to the words you know, for $12.99 a month.
• Read Bean: graded readings for HSK 1–6 built from real articles, for $14.99 a month.
• Chinese Short Dialogue: daily dialogues on trending topics, HSK 1 to 6+. It's the closest thing to SayMei Dialogues we found.
• Pleco graded readers: 105 readers inside the Pleco dictionary, including 58 illustrated Rainbow Bridge folklore readers at $2.99 each.
• Chinese Breeze, 汉语风(Hànyǔ Fēng): over 60 illustrated print readers at eight levels, with audio at normal and slow speed, sold by retailers such as Purple Culture.
• Read Mandarin: free HSK 1–6 readings with pinyin, tap-to-translate and audio, by a Chinese teacher.
• Duolingo: its reading page lists Stories for seven languages, not Chinese. There's more in Is Duolingo good for Chinese?

What to do next

• Try two free samples first. Listening and reading before you pay shows you the audio and the pictures.
• Pick by what you'll read most. Stories, news and real novels each point to a different app.
• Listen while you read. Audio with the text helped beginners more than silent reading.
• Choose stories where you know nearly every word. If you don't, lean on the pinyin, English and audio until you do.

Start with chapter 1 of any SayMei story, free with no sign-up.