KiwiScience · Language for scientists
Mandarin Tutor
Open the tutor
Twelve units, thirty-six lessons, and 1,519 words with pinyin and English. Every lesson opens with a rapid-fire round that does not let you past until the vocabulary is genuinely in place, then dialogues you can play in Mandarin, drills that build sentences from tiles, and a spaced-repetition queue that keeps everything you have met from slipping away.
Start with lesson 1 → 📚How it works
What a lesson contains, how tones and pinyin are shown, how the audio is produced, a summary of every grammar point in the course, and how to add vocabulary of your own.
Read the guide → 🔍The vocabulary
Six tiers, from the foundation words through soil science and plant biology to the formal register of written Chinese. Searchable by character, pinyin or English, and usable as a reference whether or not you are working through the course.
Browse the vocabulary →Click to hear it, right-click to read it
Every Chinese word on every page is a target, including the words in this sentence: 土壤, 植物, 根际. Click one and it is spoken in Mandarin. Right-click one and you get its pinyin, its part of speech, its English meaning, and a breakdown of what each character in it contributes. On a phone or tablet, press and hold for the second of those.
土壤 is an arbitrary noise until you can see that it is 土 "earth" plus 壤 "loose fertile soil", at which point 壤土 "loam" and 砂壤土 "sandy loam" stop being new words. Characters are the unit that makes six thousand words learnable instead of impossible.
Chinese audio, no English audio
Audio uses whatever Chinese voice your operating system provides, which means no download and no network connection. If you have none installed the app says so and tells you how to add one. There is also an optional neural voice (Kokoro, running in the browser via WebAssembly) which speaks markedly better Mandarin, at the cost of a one-off 90 MB download that only happens if you press the button.
Answering a question plays the answer: the word for a word drill, the whole sentence for a sentence drill, right or wrong. The last thing you hear is always the correct form.
Your progress, and keeping it
Progress is kept in named profiles, so a shared laptop can carry a student and a supervisor, or a second clean run through the course, without either disturbing the other.
Browser storage is not a backup. Clearing site data destroys it and it does not follow you to another machine. Any profile can be saved to a file on disk and loaded back later, either over the profile you are in or into a new one. The file is plain JSON named for the profile and the date.