What’s the best English to Chinese dictionary app?

Learning a highly complicated foreign language like Chinese, you’ll need a reliable English to Chinese dictionary app to help you on your journey. You can only spend your money once in the app store, so which online Chinese dictionary offers the best features?

A good Chinese dictionary app is one of the most essential tools for learning Mandarin. Whether you’re looking up unfamiliar characters, checking pronunciation, exploring example sentences, or building your vocabulary, having the right dictionary at your fingertips saves a lot of time. But with so many apps available, which one should you choose? In this article, we’ll compare some of the most popular Chinese dictionary apps, including Pleco, Hanping, Hanzii, and trainchinese, looking at their features, strengths, weaknesses, and pricing. We’ll also revisit a few older favorites to see which ones are still worth using in 2026. The goal is simple: to help you find the Chinese dictionary app that best suits your learning needs.

Pleco online Chinese dictionary

Pleco is probably the most longstanding (and installed) Chinese-English dictionary app with paid add-ons for serious or more advanced learners, some of which can be bought in bundles. But, to be honest, even the free version gets you a long way.

My favorite features include the clipboard reader that helps you to read any copy-pasted text “inside the dictionary” and the detailed search history. Pleco offers a number of highly useful add-ons like flashcards, additional dictionary, historical character information and graded readers, supporting your Chinese learning journey as you go.

Update (October 2026): Pleco 4.0, a major redesign remains in beta testing on iOS. Although the beta introduces significant improvements to flashcards, character lookup, and the user interface, the regular App Store version is still Pleco 3.2. New versions for Android are also in the making.

Hanping Chinese Dictionary 汉英词典

Hanping Chinese Dictionary has been around since 2009, making it one of the veterans among Chinese dictionary apps for Android. For years, it came in two versions: Hanping Lite and Hanping Pro. The Lite version was essentially the free, somewhat limited sibling of the paid Pro version, which offered additional features and more advanced learning tools.

Since October 2024, however, things have changed considerably: Hanping Chinese Dictionary Pro became free for everyone. In January 2025, Hanping Lite was officially retired, leaving the former Pro version (now simply called Hanping Chinese Dictionary) as the main app. A welcome move, especially for learners who no longer need to choose between two versions or pay upfront to access the main dictionary. Some advanced features and additional dictionaries still require one-time purchases, though. In December 2025, Hanping finally became available for iOS.

Hanping Chinese Dictionary has some genuinely useful features, including its Pinyin soundboard, radical list, handwriting recognition, native-speaker pronunciation, and example sentences with English translations. More additions include character decomposition, phonetic relatives, improved vocabulary management, and support for HSK vocabulary lists (new & legacy).

Two particularly interesting additions arrived this year. The free Document Reader lets you paste longer Chinese texts or open TXT, Word, and EPUB files, then tap individual words to look them up. This addresses one of my earlier complaints about the limited usefulness of the clipboard reader for longer texts. Hanping also introduced an integrated Image Reader, allowing you to recognize and look up Chinese text in photos and screenshots. The Image Reader is available on Android as an optional paid feature, with a free trial (three free images), while iOS support was still forthcoming in October 2026.

Unlike before, you no longer necessarily need a separate app for image-based OCR. However, the older Hanping Camera and Hanping Popup apps remain available for Android users who want live camera translation or an OCR-powered dictionary overlay on top of other apps.

As for flashcards, Hanping integrates with AnkiDroid on Android rather than providing a fully independent spaced-repetition system. Exporting vocabulary to AnkiDroid requires a one-time in-app purchase, and AnkiDroid itself must be installed separately.

Other optional purchases include the ABC Chinese-English and English-Chinese dictionaries, additional audio recordings, and stroke order animations for thousands of characters. Add-on prices can be checked through Hanping’s purchase system. There are no subscriptions, which is certainly a plus.

Overall, Hanping has become a more capable and attractive alternative to Pleco, especially if you’re looking for a free Chinese dictionary with solid offline functionality and the option to purchase additional learning tools as needed.

HanBook online Chinese Dictionary

HanBook Chinese Learning Dictionary is a new kid on the block and an interesting one too. The app has been developed by Han Language, an educational technology company, founded in Dec 2020, focusing on online Chinese learning for foreigners. It’s been downloaded over 100,000 times, showing the app is being well-received.

As for input methods, we get the full deal: English, Hanzi, pinyin, radicals, voice to text and optical character recognition. This last one (OCR) is a free feature. More than just looking up characters, you can also practice your pronunciation by recording your voice with the in-app pronunciation analysis feature. For instance, you look up the word 眉毛 and read aloud the example sentence 他的眉毛很粗 and get instant feedback on your tones and over-all performance. The same goes for writing Hanzi: look up and practice. HanBook evaluates your performance by listing your mistakes. Really useful.

But there is more: HanBook also offers mini lessons, games and level-specific content that goes well beyond HSK 4. To get a taste you can go to Flashcards → Words → My Wordbooks to find complete sets of vocabulary on almost any topic, including popular Chinese textbooks like Developing Chinese, New Practical Chinese Reader and others. And it almost goes without saying that you can create and study your own flashcards as well.

HanBook brings a new concept into the world of Chinese dictionary apps: the VIP-status thing. Your VIP-status grants you unlimited use of all app features, but the status has to be earned by performing certain tasks like logging in for 3 consecutive days, giving HanBook a 5-star review, following their Facebook account and so on. Meaning: more app engagement, more VIP points rewarding you. If this is manipulation exploiting our reward system or something that is simply part of the app experience, I’ll leave up to you.

Update (October 2026): HanBook Chinese Dictionary, later known as HanBook: Learn Chinese Smarter, appears to have been discontinued. The app last received updates in 2023 and disappeared from Google Play in December 2024. It is also no longer available on Apple’s App Store. Despite having attracted hundreds of thousands of downloads and generally positive user reviews, HanBook seems to have quietly disappeared without an official explanation from its developer. Unfortunately, I can no longer recommend it as an actively maintained Chinese dictionary app.

Trainchinese online Chinese Dictionary and Flash Cards

Trainchinese has been around since 2010, the company being registered in the Netherlands. The app has been installed over 500.000 times and uses its own dictionary. You need a paid subscription (starting from € 16,99 for 3 months) to use all functions and features. Audio has to be downloaded for offline use. Trainchinese has all basic dictionary functions you would expect from a dictionary app, but there are better alternatives.

Update (October 2026): trainchinese Online Chinese Dictionary is still going strong and continues to receive regular updates. Available for Android, iOS and desktop, it combines a free Chinese-English dictionary with around 130,000 entries, example sentences, pronunciation recordings, measure words, stroke order animations and an integrated flashcard system.

LINE dictionary: Chinese-Eng

LINE dictionary: Chinese-Eng (500,000+) has one main point of attraction for me: it loads an almost unlimited amount of example sentences. This excellent for sentence mining, reading practice and simply expanding your vocabulary. Apart from that it has the usual dictionary features you’d expect like a (very basic) search history, stroke order animations and audio. Beyond that, you get a sentence analyzer and feed with daily expressions, quotes and proverbs. It’s a pity the sentence analyzer doesn’t translate full sentences.

Update (October 2026): LINE Dictionary: Chinese–English is no longer available. The free dictionary app, developed by South Korean technology company NAVER, was officially discontinued on October 18, 2023, and removed from Google Play in December of that year. Fortunately, NAVER offers a successor in the form of its free English–Chinese / Chinese–English Dictionary, which includes extensive vocabulary, example sentences, and pronunciation features.

Chinese Dictionary Hanzii

Hanzii is a dictionary app made in Vietnam that has been installed well over 1.000.000 times. With the free version of the app you get plenty: all thinkable input methods, simplified and traditional characters, stroke order diagrams and many example sentences. Another sympathetic feature is the image tab showing pictures for each search entry. The app’s interface can be described as somewhat clumsy and not very streamlined though. I personally don’t need this overload of feed items, ads and extras and prefer a fast and easy-to-use dictionary.

With a premium account (one-time payment € 41,99; 1 year for € 27,99 or 3 months for € 18,99) you get some extra features: search handwriting offline, learning progress statistics, remove ads, writing practice, grammar, Chinese idioms and HSK exam preparation.

On the whole Hanzii looks like a decent English to Chinese dictionary app. However, I’m not fully convinced by the quality of the example sentences. In some cases, the Chinese sentence doesn’t correspond to the English translation. I also experienced some issues looking up words by writing pinyin. Entering “baohu”, Hanzii showed me only one translation, namely 宝湖 (treasure lake) instead of the most relevant entry 保护. Same experience with “jiaoyu” – instead of 教育 I get 焦鱼 (burnt fish). This is why I can’t recommend the app “wholeheartedly” at this point.

Update (October 2026): Hanzii Chinese Dictionary is still very much alive and has evolved into a comprehensive Chinese-learning app. It now combines dictionary lookups with AI-powered translation, handwriting and image recognition, character breakdowns, stroke order animations, integrated flashcards, and HSK preparation materials. Recent improvements include support for the new HSK 3.0 exams, document and PDF translation, and better Traditional Chinese support. However, while the app is free to download, advertisements, usage limits, and paid subscriptions or upgrades are worth keeping in mind.

Conclusion

Developing a successful English to Chinese dictionary app is a highly specialized business where linguistics (lexicography), app design and digital learning come together. Having seen and experienced all these different apps – I still think Pleco gives you most for your money’s worth. The Pleco team understands their business and the needs of Chinese learners, from beginners to the most advanced level. You can make Pleco as powerful as you want, depending on how much money you’re prepared to spend. It’ll grow with you as you grow.

Where Pleco is kind of old-school, HanBook is a new generation app that brings AI-powered learning and gratification-principle into the field. In other words, HanBook is not a “neutral tool”, it triggers you into learning, rewarding your positive behavior. Unusual for a dictionary app, just like the fact it’s free. I mentioned some privacy concerns you might or might not share with me, but apart from that, this app is impressive and it’ll be interesting to see where it’s going in the future.

Hanping has come a long way. Recent additions such as the integrated document reader, image recognition, and improved vocabulary management have made it a much more comprehensive study tool. Pleco still might have the upper hand when it comes to dictionary depth, specialist reference works and integrated flashcards, but Hanping has definitely become a strong alternative, especially when you’re less keen on (paying for) sinologist add-ons.

Line is a good choice for sentence mining – meaning that you’re not merely looking up words and their meaning, but also delve deep into connected characters and sentences. Apart from that, Line’s features are pretty limited. The same goes for Trainchinese which couldn’t convince me.

Hanzii still needs some improvements. Unfortunately, I don’t fully trust their sentence translations between Chinese and English, and maybe even more importantly, I had some real problems finding Chinese words using pinyin.

My personal top 6:

1. Pleco
2. Hanping
3. HanBook (discontinued)
4. Line
5. Hanzii
6. Trainchinese

Thanks for reading! This review is – let’s be honest – completely subjective and the product of my own biases and limited knowledge, so feel free to disagree or correct mistakes.

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