You can read Chinese.
You still can't hear it.
Hanzen is a free Chinese app that plays each word before you see it. Keep the reading you have, and start understanding people when they talk.
Opens in your browser. No install, no signup, no card.
How it works
Most apps train your eyes. Hanzen trains your ear.
Twenty minutes a day, three steps.
Hear it
The word plays aloud. You listen before you look.
Reach for it
You pull the meaning out of the sound. The character shows to confirm, not to prompt. Real conversation has no subtitles.
Keep it
The word comes back right before you'd forget it. Spaced repetition turns twenty minutes a day into words you keep for years.
A hard character gets a short scene for the first few days. An actor for the sound, a set for the rest, the components as props. Once you can recall the word on your own, you drop the scene.
The scene
Scaffolding you take down.
The actor tells you the sound. The set tells you the rest. The props tell you what it means. For a few days you watch the scene when the word plays. Then the word comes on its own, and the scene goes dark.
You learn tone by ear, in real words. You never read a tone number.
- Reading
- hǎo, third tone. Good, fine.
- Actor
- The h- voice. One actor for every h- word.
- Set
- The -ao place. The same room every time -ao plays.
- Props
- 女 woman · 子 child
Now live: Hanzen Watch, a Chrome extension
Chinese video you can follow.
Train a word by ear in Hanzen, then open a Chinese video and hear it used. Hanzen Watch marks the words you know in the captions. Click any other word to look it up.
- 1Train the word by ear in Hanzen.
- 2Open any Chinese video on YouTube or Bilibili.
- 3Every word you've trained is marked, so you catch it mid-sentence. Tap a line to split it into words, sound and meaning.
我今天很累
Runs on your own machine. Nothing you watch leaves it. Not affiliated with YouTube, Google, or Bilibili.
What you get
A full course. Nothing locked.
Listening first is the harder path. You reach for the word before the character shows. That is the point. The whole course is free while we're in beta.
| 1 | All 3,000 of the most common characters, each taught from parts you already know. | 3,000 |
| 2 | Spaced repetition that brings each word back at the right moment. | Daily |
| 3 | Works offline. Your progress lives in your browser, private by default. | Local |
| 4 | Free while in beta. No card, no wall, nothing held back. | Free |
| 5 | Hanzen Watch, a free Chrome extension that marks the words you know in real video. Get it on the Chrome Web Store. | Live |
Cross-device sync is on the way. If pricing ever changes we'll say so here first, and what you've learned stays yours.
Keep the reading. Build the ear.
Twenty minutes a day. All 3,000 characters, free while in beta.
Hear your first wordQuestions go to support@hanzen.app. A real person answers.