Hanzi Keeper: Chinese Widget

Hanzi Keeper puts a Chinese quiz on your iPhone Lock Screen: a question with two answers, and you tap one right there. It’s for people who learned Chinese and feel it slipping away, and for those learning it now. After your tap, the tile shows a check mark or an X, the character, and its pinyin, until the next question: every half hour by default, day and night. Four kinds of questions, all about Chinese: • Look-alikes. Which is “already”: 已 or 己? • Tones. Is 好 read hǎo or hào when it means “good”? • Measure words. What goes in 一 ___ 车? • Meanings. Which character means “to learn”? A medium Home Screen widget asks the same question with up to four choices. That’s harder to guess, so those answers count for more than two-choice ones. It starts with a placement test of about two minutes: up to 45 everyday characters, “I know it” or “I don’t.” Your level, a rounded estimate, adjusts as you answer. In the app: • Today: your answers so far, the character you just answered, your level, and what is fading, rescued, or ready for Practice. • Practice: up to ten characters, no multiple choice. Recall each one, reveal the answer, then tap Not yet, Almost, or Got it. One answer counts for about six Lock Screen taps. • Characters: most common first. Search by character, meaning, or pinyin, tone marks optional (hao, hǎo, hao3). • History: every answer from the last 30 days, and where you gave it. • Saved: bookmark characters and words. Save a character you haven’t started, and it joins your Lock Screen quiz. Each character’s page gives its meaning, one or two common words (学习, 学校), and, when there is one, an example sentence, each with pinyin and a translation. Look-alikes get a note on why they’re easy to mix up. A writing square lets you trace the character; it doesn’t grade your strokes. If your iPhone has a Mandarin voice, you can hear it. Example sentences cover 3,338 characters, most from Tatoeba, where people wrote them; the rest, and translations Tatoeba lacks, were written for the app. Each was checked for natural Chinese and suits all ages. The app and its meanings come in English, French, Japanese, and Korean. Japanese and Korean users also see their own reading, such as ガク・まなぶ or 학 for 学. You can show simplified, traditional, or both. This isn’t a course: no lessons, no streaks, no points, no leaderboards. On a day with five widget answers or more by 8 p.m. (or the time you choose), a notification then says how many you answered and offers a one-minute evening recap of up to ten of the day’s characters, four choices each. It arrives quietly in Notification Center unless you allow banners. If you allow it, another each Sunday evening says how many characters were rescued. Notifications never say how many you missed. A daily reminder is optional. Free: most features, for the 3,500 everyday characters, the size of China’s official list of commonly used characters. The Lock Screen watches 100 characters at a time, the ones most worth saving. Hanzi Keeper Pro is a one-time purchase. The Lock Screen then watches every character you know, and all 9,312 characters unlock. Questions can come every 15 minutes, or a minute after each answer, and you can include characters marked “Rare today.” Focus: new characters come first from one of 19 topics, like food or travel, and the Lock Screen asks about it more, but not only: characters slipping elsewhere still come up. Pro adds a small Home Screen widget with two choices, also in StandBy, and a large one with up to four and today’s answers. No subscription. Family Sharing included. No account, no ads, no analytics, no tracking. Your progress stays on your iPhone and in your private iCloud, which the developer can’t read. Sources, credited in the app: CC-CEDICT, CFDICT, Unihan, and Tatoeba. Support: https://hanzikeeper.vercel.app/support Privacy Policy: https://hanzikeeper.vercel.app/privacy Terms of Use: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/