Radical

Learning Chinese meant jumping between a reader, a dictionary, a translator, and a flashcard app — and losing something in every handoff. Words I looked up rarely reached my reviews, and the sentences I met them in were gone by the time they did. So I built the tool I wanted: read, tap anything unfamiliar, and let it come back later.

What it is

An interactive reader with profiles and stories organized by level and theme. Every word in a text is tappable — translation, pinyin, part of speech, pronunciation — and can be saved together with the sentence it appeared in. Saved words flow into flashcards scheduled by spaced repetition, with three review modes: recognize the character, produce it from meaning, or understand it by ear. Progress, levels, streaks, and achievements track the road, and both the interface and translation targets adjust per profile.

The sentence comes with the word, always.

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The sentence comes with the word, always.

What it taught me

• Context is the product. A word saved with the sentence it appeared in survives review; a word saved from a dictionary list doesn't.
• Trust the schedule, not the mood. Spaced repetition means the app decides when a word should come back, and my only job is to show up.
• One word is several skills. Recognition, production, and listening are different doors into the same memory — doing well at one says almost nothing about the others.
• Motivation deserves engineering. Consistency, not difficulty, is what stops most learners. Showing up is the feature.
• Degrade gracefully. Translation and speech depend on the network, so the app says so plainly when the connection is gone instead of failing silently mid-sentence.

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Flashcard review screen with a character prompt and answer controls

Where it stands

A personal tool, built for my own practice — and the project I keep returning to because I keep using it.