About
MandarinAI is a new product, made by one person, for the kind of learner who measures a tool by the words they still know a month later.
For two years my routine was an Anki deck in one window and a graded reader in the other. The deck decided what I was supposed to be learning. The reader decided what I actually met on the page. They never once agreed.
I would drill a character on Monday and not see it again for a month — and when I finally did, it arrived in a story that glossed it for me, as though I had never spent a week on it. The reading did nothing for the deck, and the deck did nothing for the reading.
The fix was not a better flashcard app, or a better reader. It was making them the same thing. MandarinAI schedules your reviews with FSRS, then writes short stories out of the exact words that schedule calls ripe — mostly words you already own, with the ones you are about to forget woven through. Reading becomes the review.
That loop is the entire product. Everything else on this site exists to serve it.
By the numbers
Not a user count — an inventory. Every figure below describes the product rather than its popularity, and none of them needs an account to verify.
11,043
Word pages
Each with pinyin, meanings, and audio. Readable before you sign up.
12
HSK word lists
HSK 1–5 under the old standard, and every HSK 3.0 band from 1 to 7–9.
14
Days of Pro, free
Every new account opens on the full plan. No credit card is asked for.
$0
The free plan
The study loop, permanently — not a trial that expires into nothing.
Not values on a wall. Three things you can hold this product to, and notice immediately if it stops doing.
Every word page — the characters, the pinyin, the meanings, the example sentences — is readable without an account, and will not move behind the subscription later. You sign in to study, not to look something up.
When a trial or a subscription ends you keep every review, list, and statistic. The free plan keeps your deck working — nothing you have learned is held hostage.
The only honest question to ask a study tool is how many words you still know next month. A streak is pleasant; it is not the point, and it is not what the schedule optimises for.
MandarinAI launched on 7 July 2026. It is new and it is small, and being told that plainly is worth more than being told it is loved. Everything that ships is written down in the changelog, and if something is broken or missing, writing to me reaches the person who can fix it.
The free plan asks for nothing, and your first review session takes about five minutes. That is a faster way to decide than anything I could write here.
No credit card required · 14-day Pro trial · Cancel anytime