Pinyin Learner vs Mencius

Pinyin Memory is a quiet place to keep the Chinese you meet --- words, lines, phrases --- and re-meet them later. Not a course. Not a translator. A personal memory center for one learner at a time. The pitch is simple: capture in 5 seconds, re-meet through play. No streaks shoving you back into the app. No grades. No leaderboards. Just your corpus, your pace, your mood. --- What you get --- CAPTURE • One-screen entry: type a hanzi, get auto-pinyin and per-character tone colors. • Tag it. Add a meaning in your language. Save. Done. • Decomposer: paste any Chinese text, tap segments to save. DICTIONARY • Your corpus, searchable across hanzi, pinyin, and meaning. • Filter by tag, kind, or how shaky you are on it. • Every entry has its own postcard with notes and TTS. RE-MEETING (the heart of it) • Recall - infinite 4-direction swipe self-test. Forget, not sure, almost, know. Cards keep coming. • Match - memory pair game from 4×4 to 10×10. • Cloze - fill in the missing character from four options. • Flashback - Tinder-style quick recognition for honest self-rating. PRACTICE • Tone Tap - hear a syllable, tap the tone. • Tone Twin - find the same-tone-pattern pair in a grid. • Daily Drop - one fresh word per day. Keep or skip. • Mosaic - drag hanzi cards to build a sentence from a translation. INSIGHTS • Streak, memory size, last-7-days bars, 5-week heatmap, by-tag breakdown. • All offline, all from your own review events. --- Local-only by design --- No account. No cloud. No analytics. No tracking pixel. No third-party SDKs hidden in the corners. Your dictionary lives in a SQLite file on your phone. Export it anytime as JSON. Delete the app, the data goes too. --- Paper & Ink design --- Warm paper, cast ink, hand-stamped serial. Italic Fraunces headings, Geist body, Caveat handwriting for your own meanings, Noto Serif SC for the hanzi. Tone colors that work with the palette --- not traffic-light red/yellow/green. Choose from 10 themes: Paper & Ink, Midnight Glow, Garden, Ember, Love Letter, Aqua Glow, Gold Century, Crimson Court, Linen, and Mocha. --- Pinyin Pro (optional) --- Free forever: Dictionary, Recall, Match, Cloze, Flashback, Decomposer, and the first two themes. Pinyin Pro unlocks: Tone Tap, Daily Drop, Tone Twin, Mosaic, and all 10 themes. Subscribe monthly, yearly or lifetime based on your needs

Learn the 3,000 most frequently used Chinese characters, enough to read 99% of everyday written Chinese. LEARN IN THE ORDER THAT MATTERS Characters are introduced by real-world frequency, so the first ones you learn are the ones you'll actually see most. No wasted effort on rare characters. WHY MENCIUS • Smart scheduling: the same spaced-repetition system as Anki, so you remember more in less time. • Translate: scan or paste any Chinese text to get pinyin over every character and English underneath • Built for learning: every character comes with pinyin, a clear definition, example sentences, the common words it appears in, and its etymology. • Learn to write: every character animates stroke by stroke, and writing practice grades your finger strokes as you trace or write from memory. • Make it a game: memorize characters by racing the brush. • Study your way: follow the raw frequency list, or pick exact HSK levels for characters AND vocabulary, and switch whenever your goal changes. • Real reading at any level: 2,900+ short stories, folk tales, interesting facts - each written only with characters you've already learned. • Browse everything: the 成语 idiom collection and 9,000+ HSK words are free to explore. • Your own words: add anything you meet in the wild; pinyin and meaning fill themselves in. • A few minutes a day: set your own pace, from a relaxed 1 new character a day to an intense 12. • Home & lock screen widgets: discover characters, preview your next words, or keep a review prompt on your lock screen. • Works offline: everything lives on your device, and no account is required (progress backed up on your iCloud account). FREE TO START Free home and lock screen widgets. Master your first 100 characters and words completely free. Reading passages at every level. 3 free translations a day. Writing practice for 10 characters a day. All characters, words, and idioms browsable. GO PREMIUM Learn all 3,000 characters and study the full HSK vocabulary, with unlimited writing practice, unlimited translations, exact-level HSK decks, custom words, streak repairs, pro review controls, detailed progress stats (activity heatmap, recall trends, and projected mastery) and every theme. Try Premium free for a week. Privacy Policy: https://mencius.app/privacy.html Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/