I started on Duolingo and strongly do not recommend it. The character recognition exercises are way worse than HelloChinese, and the focus on having different cartoon characters teach you means they have a couple really-incomprehensible audio sometimes. Like I don't need to learn Chinese through simulated baby talk, and it's worse than with most languages because it messes with the tones.
Most exercises are either in hanzi or pinyin, with no option for both side by side (imo the best way to learn - reading the characters with a convenient pronunciation guide). They've also gamified it to a degree that I was chasing leaderboards rather than focusing on learning.
Maybe Duolingo is good for other languages, but I had a very negative experience using it for Chinese, doing it daily for 3 months. HelloChinese is better even if you only use the free features.
I started on Duolingo and strongly do not recommend it. The character recognition exercises are way worse than HelloChinese, and the focus on having different cartoon characters teach you means they have a couple really-incomprehensible audio sometimes. Like I don't need to learn Chinese through simulated baby talk, and it's worse than with most languages because it messes with the tones.
Most exercises are either in hanzi or pinyin, with no option for both side by side (imo the best way to learn - reading the characters with a convenient pronunciation guide). They've also gamified it to a degree that I was chasing leaderboards rather than focusing on learning.
Maybe Duolingo is good for other languages, but I had a very negative experience using it for Chinese, doing it daily for 3 months. HelloChinese is better even if you only use the free features.