I'm building an app for learning Chinese through immersion, and would love your feedback

Hi!

I’ve been working on an iOS app for intermediate learners of Chinese which I think some of you might find useful.

It’s an immersion based app, similar to LingQ, where you consume content and mark words you don’t know for review, but with a lot more Chinese and website specific functionality, and more advanced flashcards. For example, YouTube integration is more advanced, and something that is fairly rare in this space is support for reading web toons through OCR, which is particularly important for Chinese because otherwise word lookups would be a massive pain. The app is Chinese aware, ie there is a list of all the Hanzi you have encountered, your word lists are sorted by (new) HSK level. There is also a built in flash card system which does contextual reviews, so when you mark a word in a YouTube video, the transcript line is also recorded, so the clip plays back when you review the word. For web toons the panel where you saw the word is recorded, and during reviews the word is blacked out for you to recall.

I’m personally using this app every day, and I’ve found it very helpful, so I hope someone here does too. It’s still in beta, but you can download it for iOS via Test Flight from my website here.

https://www.mugengo.app/?language=cn

I am also very active on Discord and taking feature requests. The app is far from finished, and I have a lot, lot of ideas.

I’ve been learning languages for a long time. I’ve studied Japanese formally since middle school, double majored in Japanese and Computer Science, achieved JLPT N1 (HSK 6 like) and also picked up Chinese and Korean through mainly self study around this time. I also taught Japanese while a uni student, so I have experience with languages through formal study, self study, as well as teaching. Chinese is my fourth language so far from native (guestimate HSK 5ish), but my head of testing / wife is a native Chinese speaker. As a Japanese learner, I have tried many Japanese apps, which overall have greater quality and quantity than apps available to Chinese learners, so I hope I can bring this experience to Chinese learners as well. This is an absolute passion project - there is nothing I love more than language learning (I do IT to pay the bills though 🥲).

Kind Regards,

Kevin

Hi Wei-Ming,

The app is more like a tool than a course - you can think of it like a web browser with built in tools to help you study content. Because it works with any material on the internet, it's impossible for human editors to check. I do hope to have a human curated beginners course one day, but right now it's more like a tool where you can import content.

The Traditional <-> Simplified conversion is using a simpler deterministic tool than an LLM so it doesn't hallucinate - using an LLM for this would be very expensive for me!

Hi @ez, it live OCRs as you scroll through the manhua, which allows you to click words on the words in the images to do word or sentence lookups.

Sure do!!

https://discord.gg/KrR6Wu33Md