Hi! thanks for your interest in our humble project. I started learning Chinese in 2021 and picking up the first couple hundred vocab words was easy. I found a Chinese character frequency list and learned the first few hundred words by rote memorizationn. As a heritage Chinese learner (2nd Gen), I always had some exposure to spoken Chinese dialects and Mandarin, but I was never able to read Chinese because literacy takes active study.
I decided to learn to read Chinese around 2022 and set a goal to get to a native level within 5-7 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 LevelChinese News around Chinese New Year 2026 to bridge that gap. I built a simple version with pinyin and segmentation, then added a basic CE-DICT (114k words) and Pleco search integration.
What I realized is that a few practical tools can make even complex native-level articles approachable. Eventually, I added sentence level translations, sentence audio, more study tools, and more media sources so I could always find content I was interested to read.
Now we are testing with a few dozen internal beta users since early 2026 and the feedback has been good. 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 Android APP is built on React Native 100% open-sourced. I have plans to open-source the backend also at a later stage when it is more mature.
You can contribute at our Github. Or you can also buy me a coffee or beer (https://ko-fi.com/zshanhui) if you find the app helpful for your Chinese studies.
Reach me at contact@levelchinese.app