Mark what you're learning. Quiz until it sticks.
A study companion for learning Chinese through the HSK levels. Flag the words and sentences you're working on right now, then drill them on reading, writing, and listening — until you don't need to anymore.
Download on the App Store iPhone · iPad · Mac · Apple Vision Pro
How it works
You're already learning Chinese somewhere — a class, a textbook, an HSK level you're working through. The hard part isn't finding vocabulary. It's the drilling: recognizing Hanzi on sight, recalling the tones, writing the strokes in the right order, and catching the words when someone says them out loud.
Zili is built for that middle part. As you go, mark the words and sentences you want to work on. They collect into your own study list, and every quiz in the app can draw from it — or from a whole HSK level, or from just the items you keep getting wrong.
Your list
Favorite any word or sentence as you meet it and it joins your study set. Zili also keeps count of what you miss in quizzes, so the words giving you trouble become a set of their own — no bookkeeping on your part.
Flashcards
Flashcards drill the pairing you choose — English to Chinese or back, Hanzi or reading, meaning or pronunciation. Cards reverse with a physical flip. Pull them from an HSK level, your favorites, or your missed pile.
Stroke order
Drawing quizzes put a character in front of you and ask you to write it. Every stroke is marked on both order and direction, with an animated hint when you slip — so you learn to produce a character, not just recognize one.
Listening
Listening quizzes play a sentence aloud and ask you to type back what you heard. Reading a character you know is one skill; recognizing it at speaking speed is a different one.
Sentences
Practice pairs each level with example sentences and conversations from HSK material, so vocabulary shows up in the grammar you'll actually meet it in. Favorite the ones worth drilling and they feed straight into listening quizzes.
Details
Work through the nine levels of HSK 3.0 or the six levels of the HSK 2.0 syllabus it replaced.
Pick the character set you're learning; the whole app follows it.
Readings render as pinyin, zhuyin (bopomofo), Wade-Giles, or Gwoyeu Romatzyh.
Hear any word or sentence pronounced, anywhere it appears in the app.
A CC-CEDICT dictionary is built in. Tap any Hanzi phrase in the app to see its reading and meaning without losing your place.
Your study list and missed-answer counts follow you between devices, in your own private iCloud container.
The vocabulary, sentences, and stroke data ship inside the app. No network, no account to create.
One universal app for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro, written in SwiftUI.
Open source
Zili is MIT-licensed and developed in the open. File an issue, send a pull request, or just have a look at how it works.