I’ve spent the last month building a Mandarin learning app. I got tired of most apps teaching me mainland Chinese vocabulary such as 自行车 in simplified characters with Pinyin and then having to unlearn it once I was actually in Taiwan not to mention getting scolded/corrected by my wife.
It is traditional characters only, Taiwan vocabulary (腳踏車, 影片, 捷運), and Zhuyin instead of Pinyin. The situations are based on real-life encounters like 早餐店, getting a haircut, 便利商店, buying train tickets, topping up a 悠遊卡.
What it contains:
- One model of what you know. Everything you do updates the same picture of your vocabulary, and everything you’re shown is chosen from it — there’s no flashcard deck sitting off to the side of the lessons.
- Spaced repetition (FSRS) for scheduling, so a word comes back just as you’re about to lose it.
- Reading pitched just above you. Passages are picked so you already know roughly 92–96% of the words in them, and reading them counts as review.
- Recognize it, then hear it, then say it. A new word starts as reading only; listening and speaking unlock once it’s stable, rather than tripling the workload on day one.
- Pronunciation scoring that never blocks you. You hear your attempt against a native recording, but bad tones don’t hold you back.
Sessions are about 15 minutes but is not blocked.
It’s still in its infancy especially content-wise at around 380 words and 290 sentences. Enough to be useful if you’re starting out, but nowhere near enough if you’re already intermediate. I’m always working on adding more content.
It’s free right now while I’m testing. I’ll probably charge for it at some point and I’d rather say that up front than springing it on anyone later.
What I’m after is feedback from people learning here: what’s missing, what’s wrong, and what reads like a textbook rather than like a person. Especially the last one.
Happy to answer questions.