Why I’m Building Hanlyny — A Chinese Learning App That Speaks Your Language

A friend of mine in Cairo has been trying to learn Chinese for two years. He’s smart, disciplined, and genuinely in love with the language. But he keeps hitting the same wall — and it’s not the Chinese.

Every app he tries explains Chinese in English. Every grammar note, every vocabulary hint, every example sentence — it all comes through English first. So his brain has to run a three-step relay — Chinese → English → Arabic — for every single word. Two years in, he’s exhausted. Not from the Chinese. From the extra language he never asked to learn through.

“Why is there no app that just teaches me Chinese in Arabic?” he asked.

I didn’t have a good answer. So I started building one.

1. You’re Not Bad at Languages. The Tools Are Letting You Down.

There are over 100 million people learning Chinese worldwide. The majority don’t speak English as their first language. Arabic speakers. Spanish, Indonesian, Russian, Vietnamese, Portuguese speakers. Heritage learners who grew up hearing Chinese at home but think in another language. HSK candidates across the Middle East, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa — preparing for an exam that will determine their university admission or career.

And nearly every major app tells them: learn English first, then Chinese.

That’s not just inconvenient. It’s a completely unnecessary tax on your attention. When you’re decoding a third language just to understand the lesson, you’re not learning Chinese — you’re translating. The mental energy that should go into remembering a character’s meaning or nailing a tone gets burned on parsing English instructions.

This is the problem Hanlyny was built to solve. But it’s not the only one.

2. Three Things Most Apps Get Wrong

When I talked to Chinese learners about what frustrated them most, three themes kept coming up — regardless of where they were from or why they were learning.

First, tones are treated like a bonus feature.

In Chinese, a single syllable like ma can mean “mother” (mā), “hemp” (má), “horse” (mǎ), or “to scold” (mà) — depending entirely on the tone. Get the tone wrong, and you’ve said a completely different word. This isn’t a pronunciation detail. It’s the backbone of the language.

Yet most apps either skip speaking practice entirely or give you a vague score — “75%” — with no clue what went wrong. You’re left wondering: was it my tone? My consonants? And how do I fix it?

Hanlyny breaks your pronunciation down syllable by syllable, with a visual tone curve that compares your voice to a native speaker’s. You can see exactly where your third tone didn’t dip enough, then practice that specific sound in slow motion until it clicks. It’s the difference between being told you played a wrong note and being shown which key to press.

Second, motivation is built on guilt.

Countdown timers. Streaks that shame you for missing a day. Points deducted for wrong answers. Leaderboards that rank you against strangers. The dominant playbook in language apps is to keep you anxious — because anxious people open apps more often.

But learning a language is not a sprint. It’s measured in months and years. Guilt works for about three weeks, and then you start avoiding the app entirely because opening it feels bad. We’ve all been there.

Hanlyny takes a different approach. There are no countdown timers. Wrong answers don’t cost you points. Miss a day? No guilt-tripping notification — just a gentle nudge about the puzzle piece waiting for you.

Because here’s what actually keeps people learning: visible, meaningful progress. Not points. Not badges. Something you can look at and think — I made that. I earned that.

Third, most apps abandon you halfway.

The majority of Chinese learning apps cap out around HSK 3 or 4 — roughly “survival Chinese.” You can order food, ask for directions, make small talk. But if you want to read a news article, understand a movie, or have a real conversation with your in-laws? You’re on your own.

Hanlyny is built for the full journey: HSK 1 through 9. From your first nǐ hǎo to reading authentic Chinese texts. Every lesson follows the same four-step loop — Learn, Memorize, Speak, Type — backed by spaced repetition that brings words back just as you’re about to forget them. The mountain is the same height for everyone. The path shouldn’t disappear halfway up.

3. A Puzzle Wall That Proves What You’ve Learned

Here’s the part I’m most excited about — and the part learners tell us they didn’t expect to love.

Every few words you master, you earn a puzzle piece. Each piece fills in one square of a larger image — a Chinese cultural scene: a porcelain vase, a Beijing skyline, a seasonal festival. Complete the full puzzle, and a beautifully illustrated article unlocks, telling you the story behind what you just revealed.

This might sound like a small thing. But here’s why it works: the pieces cannot be bought. Not with money. Not with a subscription. Not with anything except actually learning the words. Your puzzle collection is a visual record of work you genuinely did. When you share a completed puzzle with friends or family, you’re not flexing a purchase — you’re showing them the Chinese you actually know.

We chose puzzles specifically because each image tells a story about Chinese culture. You’re not just collecting pretty pictures. Every completed puzzle teaches you something — about the history of blue-and-white porcelain, about the architecture of the Forbidden City, about the traditions behind the Mid-Autumn Festival. The collection is the curriculum.

4. What 15 Minutes a Day Actually Looks Like

I’ll be honest: learning Chinese takes time. No app can change that. What an app can do is make those daily minutes count — and make you want to come back.

Here’s the rhythm. You open Hanlyny, and the first thing you see is your current puzzle — how many pieces you’ve lit up, how many remain, what the full image will look like when it’s done. You can see exactly where yesterday’s work went.

Then you start learning. A new word appears: the character in large type, the pinyin beneath it, a native speaker’s pronunciation at the tap of a button. The meaning is explained in your language — not English. An example sentence shows you how the word is actually used. You flip the card to test yourself. When you’re ready, you mark it as learned.

Next, the app quizzes you: hear the word, pick the right meaning from four choices — all in your language. Then you type it in pinyin, exactly as you would on your phone. Words you get wrong go into a review queue and come back later. Words you get right move forward in the spaced-repetition cycle — you’ll see them again in a day, then three days, then a week, each time a little more firmly planted in long-term memory.

After about 15 minutes, you’ve learned or reviewed a handful of words. The session ends with a summary: what you covered, what needs more practice — and if you’ve hit a milestone, a new puzzle piece lights up. No pressure. No countdown. Just a sense of having moved forward.

5. Where We Are — And Where We’re Going

Hanlyny launched this summer with English as the first bridge language, covering the complete learning loop for HSK 1 through 3: Learn, Memorize, and Type are all live, with a growing library of words, example sentences, and practice exercises. Our first puzzle series — Chinese Landmarks — is ready for you to collect, piece by piece.

Tone-level pronunciation feedback is in active development — the speech recognition and visual tone curves described above will roll out in the coming months. Graded reading — articles matched to your HSK level, with tap-to-translate for any word — is next in the queue.

And then the bridge languages. Arabic, Spanish, French, Russian, Portuguese — each one is the same Hanlyny content, translated into the language you think in. The product doesn’t fork for each language. The teaching just meets you where you are.

We offer a 21-day free trial of Hanlyny Plus. No credit card required — and you can cancel anytime from your account page, in one click. The free tier stays free forever. The puzzles are never behind a paywall. You earn them, period.

6. Let’s Climb

If you’ve tried to learn Chinese before and felt like the app was designed for someone else — someone who already speaks English, someone who just wants to dabble, someone who doesn’t care about actually getting to fluency — I hope you’ll give Hanlyny a try.

If you’re a heritage speaker who can understand your family at the dinner table but can’t read a menu or write a text message back — this is for you. If you’re grinding toward an HSK exam and need a clear path that doesn’t dead-end at Level 4 — this is for you. If you’re just curious about one of the world’s oldest living writing systems and want to see where the road leads — this is for you.

Chinese is a mountain. It doesn’t get shorter. But the path can be clearer. The steps can be steadier. The view from each summit — the first time you read a street sign without translating, the first time you make a Beijing taxi driver laugh, the first time you finish a short story in Chinese — is absolutely worth the climb.

One word at a time. Come with us.