Chinese

Read Chinese without stopping at every character.

The news, a web novel, a podcast on the walk home. Pinyin sits above the words you have not learned yet and disappears from the ones you have, so the page gets quieter as you get better.

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中文

Why it stalls

The problem is that characters do not tell you how they sound.

You can study 2,000 characters and still open a news article to a wall of shapes you cannot say out loud. Textbooks solve this by never letting you out of the textbook, where every character has been introduced in order. Real writing does not work like that, so the first unfamiliar character ends the sentence and you go and find a dictionary.

On the page

Pinyin over the word, not beside it

Pinyin sits directly on top, so your eye takes the sound and the character together instead of jumping to a gloss at the end of the line. It goes over the whole word rather than each character, because 天气 is one word and reading it as two is how you end up with a vocabulary of syllables.

今天jīntiān天气tiānqì很hěn好hǎo。

The weather is lovely today.

One tap

The word answers you where it stands.

Not the first entry in a dictionary list, but what the word is doing in this sentence. Hear it, ask about it, or save it, without leaving the line you were reading.

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So it sticks

Every word you save comes back at the right moment.

Saved words join a review queue built on spaced repetition, and each one keeps the sentence you met it in. Your Chinese (Simplified) queue is its own: learn three languages at once and none of them bleed into the others.

How the review works

Chinese (Simplified)

Questions worth asking first.

Do I need to know characters before I start?

No, but you will get more out of it if you know a few hundred. Below that, start with the graded lessons and stories, which are written to your level and carry narration. The news is worth reaching for once you can get through a graded story without stopping every line.

Does it teach simplified or traditional?

Both, as separate languages with separate libraries, levels and review queues. Most learners want simplified. Pick traditional if you are learning for Taiwan or Hong Kong.

Can I turn the pinyin off?

Yes, and you can do better than off. Set it to hide on words you have already learned, so it stays only where you still need it and the page cleans itself up as you improve.

Or learn another. Or three at once.

Start with something you actually wanted to read.

Make an account and you are reading Chinese (Simplified) in under a minute. No card, no trial countdown.

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