An iOS app that helps Chinese learners stop relying on pinyin, with short graded HSK stories and tap-to-lookup.
The problem
Most Chinese learning material shows pinyin next to every character. It makes the first steps easier, but it also means many learners never actually learn to recognize characters on their own: they read the romanization and skip the Chinese.
What Mandaro does
Mandaro gives you short stories graded to HSK vocabulary and shows them in characters only. When you get stuck, you tap a word and see its meaning without leaving the story.
- Graded stories, characters only, no pinyin.
- Tap-to-lookup for any word, right inside the text.
- A comprehension quiz after each story.
- Practice built from the words you looked up, so review targets exactly what you didn’t know.
- Listen to any line with the device’s built-in text-to-speech.
- No account and offline-first: progress stays on the device.
How it’s built
The stories are the product, so they are treated as data. They live in a schema with their own tooling: generators that build whole catalogs, a validator that checks every story against its HSK level and gates CI, and a browser-based pack builder for writing stories by hand. The app itself is built with Flutter.
Mandaro is a free download with free stories in every pack. Each Story Pack is a one-time purchase, with no subscription.