What's New

Make your own word lists for work, travel, hobbies, or whatever you're learning next. Open My Word Lists to create a list, then choose Add to My Word Lists from a word's menu in the reader or dictionary, or from its detail page.

Save a word to more than one list, search and filter your collections, and practise them with Flashcards or Cloze. You can also export a list as plain text or a Manda file. Organising words into lists keeps their existing learning status and review progress intact.

Uploading Chinese text from an image now handles more printed layouts, tilted text, faint backgrounds, and mixed Simplified and Traditional Chinese. Choose Upload Image from Import Text to try it.

We tested 10 real photographs and scans, from signs and notices to menus and packaging. See every image, Manda's unedited result, and the limits we found in How good is Manda's image OCR?

Your studying now earns achievements — 320 badges across twelve tracks, all quietly worked out from what you already do. Words known, words mastered, review streaks, active days, lessons finished, texts read and more each have their own ladder to climb.

There's nothing new to grind and no points to chase: a badge is earned the moment your real progress passes its mark. That also means restoring a backup or syncing another device lights up everything you'd already earned — there's no separate score to keep.

A new Achievements card on your Dashboard shows the badges you've earned most recently and the next few within reach. From there, View all achievements opens the full Achievements page — every badge, ordered by how close you are, with the ones you've already earned up top.

Five changes to how studying works, aimed at the things that quietly made reviewing harder than it needed to be.

Cards you fail come back. Rating a card Again used to mean it vanished until tomorrow, the one card you'd just proved you didn't know. Now it returns a few cards later in the same session, so you get another attempt while it's still fresh. A word can come back up to three times before it's left for next time.

Listening cards. A new Listen → English direction on the Flashcards setup screen plays the word and shows nothing at all until you reveal: no characters, no pinyin. Tap the speaker to hear it again, or press R. Set it as your default in Settings → Study & review → Study direction.

Example sentences on every card. Flip a flashcard and the answer now ends with a real sentence using the word, with every other word in it clickable for a quick lookup, so you see the word doing its job, not just its definition.

Going away? Pause your reviews. A new switch on the Due for Review card (on your Dashboard and on /due) stops reviews building up while you're away. Nothing comes due while it's on, and switching it back off picks up exactly where you left off: a fortnight away comes back as the reviews you already owed, not a fortnight of backlog.

Late-night study counts for the right day. A study day now starts at 4am rather than midnight, so a session that runs past twelve stays one day's work: your daily limit doesn't reset halfway through, and your streak survives. Pick any hour in Settings → Study & review → Day starts at.

Reviews are now paced so they never pile up all at once. Two limits control the flow: new words per day (10 by default) and maximum reviews per day (100). Add a whole HSK level to your Study List and you'll meet it a handful of words at a time instead of facing hundreds of due cards the next morning.

When the daily limit is holding words back, the Due for Review page says so, and if you're in the mood for more, there's a “Study more today” button to work through the backlog at your own pace.

Tune both limits, or turn them off entirely, in Settings → Study & review.

Every Chinese character on the site is now colored by its tone: red for tone 1, orange for tone 2, green for tone 3, blue for tone 4. Neutral (5th) tone inherits the surrounding color.

The coloring is site-wide: it applies in the reader, word lists, flashcards, example sentences, cloze exercises, passage study, speed reader, dictionary lookups, and everywhere else Chinese text appears.

• On by default: no setup needed. Turn it off in Settings → Display & audio → Tone colors or via the Display dropdown in the reader.
• Colors adapt to dark mode with lighter, softer variants so they stay readable.
• Tone is read from the CC-CEDICT pinyin entry for each word, with a per-character fallback for words not in the dictionary.

There's a new Books page: a small shelf of Chinese books you can read right in the app, no upload needed. It's starting with one book, with more to come.

Find it under Reading → Books in the menu. Pick a book, choose a chapter, and it opens in the reader exactly like your own uploaded EPUBs, with pinyin, tap-to-look-up, translation, and everything else.

Browse the shelf →

The reader can now show an English translation beneath every sentence, so you can check your understanding without leaving the text.

Open the Display dropdown in the reader and switch Translation on. Each sentence, split at Chinese sentence enders (。！？), gets its translation shown just below the characters and pinyin.

• Translations load on demand for the page you're reading and are cached, so paging back and forth never re-fetches.
• Press R in the reader to toggle it without opening the menu.

The setting is saved and persists across sessions.

A new Segmentation tab in Settings gives you control over how Chinese text is split into words across the reader, passage study, and speed reader.

• CC-CEDICT re-segmentation: toggle the second-pass dictionary scan that refines word boundaries for words Jieba doesn't recognise. On by default.
• Custom words: add any words or phrases (one per line) that should always be kept as a single token and never split further. Useful for names, technical terms, or any compound you always want treated as one unit. Supports both simplified and traditional input.

Settings are saved to your device and synced to your account.

The reader now supports Smart Pinyin: a mode that hides pinyin selectively based on your vocabulary, so you can challenge yourself on the words you already know while keeping annotations visible for the ones you're still learning.

Open the Display dropdown in the reader and set Smart Pinyin to one of three modes:

• Off: pinyin behaves as normal (controlled by the Pinyin toggle).
• Unknown words only: pinyin is shown only for words not in your Known Words list. Known words appear without any annotation.
• Unknown words + Study List: pinyin is hidden for both your Known Words and your Study List, so only completely unfamiliar words are annotated.

Press S in the reader to cycle through the three modes without opening the menu. The setting is saved and persists across sessions.