Hi, thanks for your interest in our little project. I started learning Chinese in 2021 and picking up the first couple hundred vocab words was easy. I found a frequency list and learned the first few hundred words. I am a heritage Chinese learner, so I always had some exposure to spoken Chinese, but I was never able to read Chinese because literacy takes active study.
I decided to learn to read Chinese around 2021 and set a goal to get to a native level within five years, but after the basics there is a real gap between native books and articles and what intermediate learners (HSK4 and HSK5) can read without looking up every other sentence. So I decided to build LearnChineseNews around Chinese New Year 2026 to bridge that gap. I built a simple version with pinyin and segmentation, then added a basic CEDICT and Pleco integration.
What I realized is that a few practical tools can make even complex native-level articles approachable. Eventually I added sentence-level translations, AI-assisted study tools, and more media sources so I could always find content I already wanted to read.
Now we are getting ready for internal beta testing with a few dozen users. If you are an intermediate Chinese learner and want to try new tools for learning by reading real native content, I would love your feedback so we can decide our next development path.
The frontend mobile app is built on react native using Expo and 100% opensourced. I do have plans to opensource the backend also at a later stage. You can contribute at our Github. You can also buy me a coffee or beer if you find the app helpful for your Chinese studies.
Reach me at shanhui.dev@proton.me