ChinesePod

I’m extremely disappointed with the ChinesePod app. I paid $30 for a monthly subscription, but the app doesn’t even recognize my paid account, leaving me unable to use the service I paid for. The app is full of bugs and basic functionality doesn’t work properly. What’s even worse is that I’ve tried contacting customer support multiple times and received absolutely no response. Paying customers deserve better communication and a working product. Right now, this feels like a complete waste of money. Would not recommend until they fix their app and improve customer support.

I’ve used ChinesePod for over 6 years and can confidently say the learning materials are top notch, and among the best you can get for advanced learners. There is a huge variety of media and advanced topics that will vastly help you improve your cultural understanding and vocabulary. Sadly, these last few years, the platform itself has been severely neglected. There are no new advanced and media lessons, and even ones they were sporadically producing for a while were not nearly as good as older lessons. But worse, the web site and iOS app have regular stability and performance problems: some lessons don’t load at all, some take a long time or hang. Even more frustrating is that there are billing issues and I was incorrectly marked a free account, even though I still have almost half a year left. Support staff responded to a few of my messages and said they were investigating, but since then completely have ignored my messages and never followed up. It looks like nobody is actively maintaining or supporting ChinesePod anymore, which is such a shame. While the materials are still great, sadly technical problems are plentiful and nobody is there to support you when you have problems now. In a word, YMMV.

Thank you for creating all these media resources to learn Mandarin. On the website, I can use a social login such as Google, but not on the app. Consequently I can’t track my progress on my iOS devices. This is very inconvenient and makes the app unusable to me. Can you please add that feature to the iOS apps? That will certainly make it a 5-star app!