Chill Chinese is live
Together with a thorough overhaul of the website, I'm happy to announce that the Chill Chinese app is now live as a web app! You can access it at app.chill-chinese.com. Mobile apps are in the making, with the Android app coming first, probably in November.
Features
When seriously learning a language, a quick way to look up words is essential. That's why we built a dictionary as the first feature of the Chill Chinese app. The dictionary currently supports basic functionalities, like search by pinyin and Chinese characters. Both simplified and traditional characters are supported. Each dictionary entry shows the pronunciation, the definitions, and HSK labels for that word.
There are also animated (and may I say quite pretty) stroke order diagrams for each character. They even support a quiz mode to practice writing Chinese characters.
Don't like the tone colors, want to quickly switch between simplified and traditional characters, or prefer reading "pin1 yin1" instead of "pīnyīn"? No problem, you can customize all of these settings within seconds. This is also were you can manage your account and subscription.
Why did it take so long?
You might be wondering why it took over half a year to build such a simple dictionary.
It turns out that building an online dictionary is not as easy as it sounds. Most dictionary apps pre-compute a lot of data to make the search fast. However, downloading all this pre-computed data would be way too slow for a web app.
So we had to come up with a way to compute the data on the fly. Some serious engineering went into making the dictionary become responsive as quickly as possible and then perform searches as fast as possible.
The result is a dictionary that becomes responsive within a few seconds (depending on the network and device speed) and performs searches in milliseconds, giving you an experience previously only available with native apps.
On top of these technical challenges we also had to build account management, payment processing, a website, and a blog. But now that all these pieces are in place, we can start focusing on the fun stuff: adding more features to the app.
What's next?
Get ready for features galore in the upcoming months. We have a lot of ideas for the app, and we're excited to start implementing them. Here are some of the features we're planning to add in the upcoming months:
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Translating whole sentences or even paragraphs
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Grammar explanations
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Example sentences
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Audio recordings
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Bopomofo support
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Reading practice
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Flashcards
The list goes on and on, but these are the things we will likely focus on next. If you have any feature requests or feedback, please let us know.
Blog posts will still be published regularly, but at a slower pace.
Closing thoughts
This is not a big bang release with a fully fleshed out app. Instead, it's a foundation for a lot of awesome features to come. It will be exciting to see where this project goes in the future and how it will help people learn Chinese.
Now is also a good time to say a big thank you to everyone who has been following this journey. Thank you very much, this wouldn't have been possible without you!
