The worksheet becomes the game
Published 5 July 2026
Every week, a Chinese class sends home a worksheet. Every week, the same scene: dense columns of characters, a poem to memorise, a text to read aloud — and a kid who'd rather be anywhere else. We rebuilt our Chinese tools around one idea: drop that worksheet in, and it becomes the game.
The problem with "learn Chinese" apps
Most Chinese learning apps teach you to order coffee. That's lovely if you're flying to Beijing on Tuesday, and useless if you're eleven years old, speak Mandarin at home, and your Saturday class is working through real graded readers — twenty-plus new characters a lesson, each one taught through its whole word family (觅 arrives with 寻觅, 觅食, 觅取 in tow), plus 成语 with stories behind them, a Tang poem to recite, and a passage to read out loud. No app knows your teacher's lesson. So the app teaches colours, the class teaches 荆棘, and never the twain shall meet.
We know because we built exactly that mistake once. Version one of our Chinese section had lovely flashcards for words our own kids had outgrown years ago. The verdict from the household was brief and correct.
So we made the worksheet the source of truth
The rebuilt section starts from the paper your class actually hands out. Drop the weekly worksheet into the importer — the PDF from the class group chat, or literally a photo of the page — and your browser reads it, recognises the shape of the homework (the 【字】word families, the 造句 phrases, the poem, the 朗读课文 text, even the fill-in writing frames), adds pinyin and meanings from a proper dictionary, and saves it as this week's lesson.
From that moment, eight tools point at your lesson. Word families with audio and smart review cards. A pinyin quiz you answer by typing (mi4 becomes mì — tones respected, near-misses honestly called "nearly"). Stroke-order writing in a 田字格 with a real from-memory test, and a 听写 dictation mode that reads a word and waits while you write it. Sentence unscrambling built from the week's own text. Poem memorisation that goes read-along → fill the blanks → recite, with a record-yourself button. Read-aloud practice where — on Chrome — the microphone listens and turns characters green as you say them. And a progress page that knows what's worth reviewing today, because every tool feeds one shared memory.
The part parents will care about
The worksheet never leaves the device. Not to us, not to anyone: the PDF is read in the browser, the OCR runs in the browser, the dictionary lives in the browser, the lessons and all progress stay in the browser. There is no account, no upload, no subscription, and no AI service reading your child's homework. It also means the whole thing works on the tablet in the back of the car, offline, once the page has loaded.
One honest limitation, stated plainly: pinyin comes from a dictionary, and Chinese has polyphones — so the import screen asks for a ten-second parental glance before saving. We'd rather have you check than quietly teach a wrong reading.
And if there's no class?
Classes end, schedules change, teachers move on. The section ships with its own graded lessons — word families, 成语, public-domain Tang poems, original readings — pitched where real learners are, and the plan runs all the way to age eighteen. The weekly-import habit and the no-class path use the same tools and the same shared memory, so switching between them costs nothing. The library of lessons you built stays yours either way.
It turns out the best curriculum for your child's Chinese was being handed to you every week. It just needed to become playable.