Du Chinese is a very good app that does not do the thing a lot of its users eventually need. It is a graded reader: thousands of levelled lessons, human narration, tap-to-translate, toggleable pinyin. As of August 2026 neither its website nor its App Store listing mentions recording your voice or any pronunciation feedback, because that was never the product.
So learners hit a familiar wall. Six months in, reading is comfortable, listening is improving, and speaking is still terrible. Then they search for a Du Chinese alternative — when what they usually need is not a replacement but an addition.
This is what to add, depending on what is actually broken.
First, work out which problem you have
"My speaking is bad" covers at least four different failures, and they need different tools.
| Symptom | Actual problem | What fixes it |
|---|---|---|
| People ask you to repeat single words | Segment or tone accuracy | A scorer that separates initial, final and tone |
| You know the sound is wrong but cannot produce it | Articulation | A human coach who can describe mouth position |
| You can say sentences slowly but freeze in conversation | Retrieval speed | Live conversation practice |
| You never speak at all | Habit | Anything with a recording button, used daily |
Buying a conversation app to fix a tone problem is the most common wasted subscription in Chinese learning.
The options, with what each is actually good at
Prices below were read from each vendor's own pricing page or US App Store listing on 10 August 2026, in USD, and vary by country and promotion.
Speechling — for when you need a human to explain it
You record from the browser or app, a certified coach listens and sends a correction, usually within a day. There is also a side-by-side comparison tool for checking yourself against a native recording.
Its genuine strength is the thing software cannot do: a coach can tell you your tongue is in the wrong place, not just that the syllable was wrong. One important caveat before you plan around the free tier — Speechling's pricing page states that its free monthly coaching allowance excludes Chinese, alongside English, French and German. Unlimited coaching starts at $19.99/month.
italki — for retrieval speed
A marketplace of teachers, priced per lesson rather than per month. Its Chinese teacher listing showed over a thousand Mandarin tutors, with trial lessons roughly $5 to $14 and regular lessons commonly $6 to $40 an hour depending on the teacher.
This is the right tool if your problem is freezing mid-sentence, and the wrong tool if your problem is that your third tone does not dip — you will spend $25 an hour on something an app does for pennies.
Super Chinese — for structure with speaking built in
An HSK-aligned course path where speaking is part of the lesson. Its FAQ says the app lets you record and check your pronunciation, and its store listing describes marking which 汉字 were pronounced with the correct tone in green and which were not in red.
That is genuinely more than most courses give you: it is tone-aware and per-character. What it does not publish is any breakdown below the character — so when a character comes back red, you still have to guess whether it was the tone, the initial or the final.
Ka — for fast tone drilling
A focused tone and pinyin trainer with speaking exercises that tell you if you mispronounce a word or tone, plus the ability to record and compare against the reference. Small, fast, gamified. Good for building the ear-mouth loop, not intended as a full course.
TonePerfect — for finding out which part of the syllable failed
The narrow job here is diagnosis. It records you and scores each syllable on three separate axes — initial, final and tone — and draws your pitch curve against the native contour.
It is explicitly not a course, a dictionary or a reader, so it sits beside Du Chinese rather than replacing it. Free tier gives a daily allowance of AI assessments; premium starts at $4.99/month. Details are on the pricing page.
Why per-syllable matters for a reader's problem
Here is the specific failure mode of a reading-heavy learner. You have seen 虽然 (suīrán, "although") a hundred times in Du Chinese lessons. You know exactly what it means. You have never once said it out loud and had anyone check.
When you finally do, something is wrong. Was it:
- the initial? s- versus a slipped sh-
- the final? -uī is a compressed diphthong that English speakers routinely flatten
- the tone? first tone on suī needs to stay high and level, second tone on rán needs to actually rise
An app that returns one verdict on the word leaves you guessing between three candidates. An app that returns three scores tells you in one attempt.
The same logic applies across the sounds that give English speakers the most trouble:
| Pinyin | Hanzi | Common error |
|---|---|---|
| qù | 去 | q- said as ch-, ü unrounded to u |
| chī | 吃 | retroflex ch- fronted, losing the curl |
| lǜ | 绿 | ü unrounded, fourth tone not falling far enough |
| èr | 二 | -r final produced as an English "are" |
Our guide to the hardest Chinese sounds for English speakers goes through these in more detail.
What about replacing Du Chinese outright?
Occasionally the right answer really is to switch. Two cases where that holds.
You have outgrown the material. If Du Chinese's upper levels no longer stretch you, The Chairman's Bao publishes graded news articles updated daily, with a very large back catalogue and six difficulty levels. Its plans page lists $11 for one month, $88 billed annually, or $420 for lifetime access. News is harder than fiction for most learners because the vocabulary is less predictable, which is exactly the point at that stage.
You want the course and the reading in one place. Super Chinese runs a full path from around HSK 1 to HSK 5 with speaking exercises inside the lessons, so you are not maintaining two subscriptions. Its App Store in-app purchases start at $11.99 for a month, with a yearly and a lifetime tier above that. You lose the sheer volume and audio quality of Du Chinese's library, and gain a structure that tells you what to do next.
Neither of these changes the underlying issue. A reading app you have swapped for a different reading app still does not tell you whether your 虽然 was intelligible.
The workflow that costs nothing extra
If you already pay for Du Chinese, the cheapest upgrade to your routine is not another subscription. It is a change of order.
- Read the lesson normally. Comprehension first, as usual.
- Listen once with the text visible. Notice the rhythm, not just the words.
- Pick five sentences you would genuinely say. Not the most interesting ones — the most useful ones.
- Copy them into a pronunciation tool that accepts arbitrary text and read each aloud until the syllable scores come back clean. The practice tool takes any pasted Chinese text, which is exactly what this step needs.
- Reread those five sentences tomorrow, out loud, before starting the new lesson.
Ten minutes. The reason it works is that you are practising pronunciation on sentences you already understand, so none of your attention is spent decoding. Our post on practising any Chinese text covers why this beats drilling isolated syllables.
So what should you actually do?
Keep Du Chinese. It is doing its job well, and the input it gives you is the raw material for everything else.
Add a diagnostic layer if you cannot tell what is wrong when someone does not understand you. Start with the free Chinese pronunciation test and see whether the failures cluster in tones, initials or finals — the answer usually surprises people.
Add a human once you know which sound is broken and cannot fix it alone. A single well-aimed Speechling correction or italki lesson is worth ten unfocused ones.
Do not buy a conversation subscription to solve a tone problem. Fix the syllables first; conversation gets dramatically easier when people stop asking you to repeat yourself.
For a broader look at which Chinese apps grade your speech and how deeply, see our comparison of Chinese pronunciation feedback apps.