December 2024 Update
Just wanna try out the new features?
Go straight to the Android
app
/ web app.
First of all, happy New Year! 🎉 We hope you had a great start into 2025 and are excited about getting good at Chinese in 2025. We certainly are excited about helping you get there!
In last month's update post, I mentioned that we would take it a bit slower in December. I'm afraid that was a lie 😄 We started adding audio support for the dictionary entries and once we started, we couldn't stop. In addition, we added example sentences for all HSK words (and even more than that). Let's check out the details!
Audio
The Chill Chinese app now has over 50 hours of audio samples. They cover all example sentences and 99.8% of the 130,000 words in the dictionary.
Just tap any of the speaker symbols to listen to the audio.
There are a few things to consider when adding audio to an app like ours. The biggest question is whether the audio needs to be recorded by a human or if an AI-driven text-to-speech (TTS) system is sufficient.
Adding human-recorded audio is a huge task, as it requires recording more than 100,000 words just to cover the dictionary entries without example sentences. After evaluating different solutions, we decided that today's TTS systems are so good that they are sufficient for our use case. In most cases it's impossible to even tell that the recording was AI-generated. Nonetheless, we extensively double- and triple-checked the audio to ensure the best possible quality.
The next challenge was to decide on how words should be pronounced. This is a bit tricky in a Chinese learning app, because as a learner, you need to hear a very clear pronunciation with very clear tones. However, that is not how people speak in real life.
We eventually chose a hybrid approach. Single words with only a few characters are pronounced clearly with very clear tones. For longer words and for example sentences, we use a more natural pronunciation (perfect for shadowing). This way, you get the best of both worlds.
One last point to consider is whether to pre-record the audio or generate it on user's devices. Many phones have TTS systems built in, but the quality can vary. To ensure the best possible quality, we decided to pre-record the audio.
Our multi-faceted and multi-layered approach was a big undertaking, but we are confident to say that we now provide the best audio experience for any Chinese dictionary out there.
Example sentences for all HSK words
This is another big one!
The app now contains over 20,000 example sentences, covering the over 5,000 words from HSK 1 all the way up to HSK 6. We have added at least three example sentences for each word, but most words have more than that. Of course, all example sentences have audio available.
All HSK entries now have example sentences and audio.
After adding curated sentences for all HSK entries, we decided to apply a best-effort approach to the rest of the dictionary, with the sentences we already had. We checked all words in the dictionary and automatically assigned existing sentences to them if they contain the word. There might be some sentences that don't perfectly fit a certain word, but we think that is better than having none at all. This way, we were able to cover over 12,000 words.
New feedback button
Although we spent a lot of time on curating the example sentences and audio samples, the sheer scale of things makes it almost impossible to catch all errors. That's why we added a feedback button to the app.
Noticed an issue with a dictionary entry? Just tap the feedback button and let us know. We will take care of it and you save everyone else from stumbling over the same issue 🙂
Simply tap the little bug button to let us know there's an issue with a dictionary entry.
What's next?
We are really happy with how the dictionary has come together over the past months. Of course, there is always room for improvement and we have a few more ideas that we want to implement. However, we will most likely focus on extending the scope of the app beyond being a dictionary in the upcoming weeks and months.
This sounds a bit vague on purpose, as we don't want to promise anything that we can't deliver. However, we are really excited about the direction we are heading and we can't wait to show you what we have in store.
Get involved
Are you encountering any issues with the app? Or is there some functionality that you would like to see? It is really important to get feedback from our users, so please let us know!
If you are enjoying the app, we would be thrilled to see your review on the Google Play Store. And of course tell your friends about it 😊
See you next time!
