Zili: Learn Chinese

Zili: Learn Chinese

by Timothy Morgan

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Free

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Zili — Chinese Study Companion Zili is a study companion for people learning Mandarin Chinese, especially through HSK. It’s the helper app that I want to use for my Chinese learning. Whether you're starting out or working through the upper HSK levels, it helps you build the skills that usually take a handful of separate apps to cover: reading, writing, listening, pronunciation, and recall. Study follows the curriculum you choose. From there, Zili gives you the tools to actually learn it: - Flashcards in any direction you like: English, Hanzi, or romanization, pronunciation or strokes. - Stroke-order practice and handwriting tests that check each stroke for the right order and direction, with animated hints when you slip. Apple Pencil supported. - Quizzes that stretch different skills: draw the character you see, or hear a sentence and type it back. - Example sentences and conversations drawn from real HSK material, with playable audio and translations. - A built-in dictionary with etymologies, cross-links, word frequency, and clear typesetting — plus tap-any-character lookup that works on every screen. Zili adapts to how you read and write. Choose Simplified or Traditional characters, and your preferred romanization — Pinyin, Zhuyin, Wade–Giles, or Gwoyeu Romatzyh. Favorite the words and sentences you want to revisit, and let Zili quietly track what you've missed so you can circle back to it. Everything runs fully offline on iPhone, iPad, and Mac — no account, no network required, just focused study whenever you have a few minutes. Zili is an independent study aid and is not affiliated with or endorsed by HSK or its administering bodies.
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What's New in Zili

1.2

September 10, 2026

Tapping a word now selects the whole word. Zili segments Chinese the way a reader does instead of guessing greedily from the character you touched, so 地方 comes up as one word rather than 地. NEW • Ask Siri for a Chinese word, or search for one in Spotlight, and Zili answers with its reading and meaning. The same lookup is available as a Shortcuts action, so a word can be passed on to the rest of a shortcut. Type English, pinyin, or Hanzi in either script. • Point at a word to peek it. On a Mac, on an iPad with a trackpad, or with a hovering Apple Pencil, resting on a word shows its reading and meaning without a tap. • Squeeze an Apple Pencil Pro while practicing strokes to flash the character's shadow underneath your writing — the one control you can reach without lifting the pen. Settings can retune the squeeze to take back a stroke instead, or turn it off. • Flip and grade flashcards from a hardware keyboard. Space turns the card over; the arrow keys judge it — right for correct, left for needs review, up to skip. • A tip now points out that words in a sentence can be tapped, which was easy to miss. ACCESSIBILITY • VoiceOver reads Hanzi in a Chinese voice everywhere the app shows it, rather than spelling characters out in an English one. In a sentence it now moves word by word instead of glyph by glyph, and reads a headword in Chinese while keeping its English meaning in your own voice. UNDER THE HOOD • Opening a second window no longer waits on the dictionary and sentence corpora, or pays for a second copy of them.

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