Journey to the West 西游记

Challenge yourself by reading a real Chinese novel, with exactly the amount of help you need!

Learning Chinese? Bored of graded readers and learning artificial 小明买苹果 sentences? What if you could read a real Chinese novel? And not just any novel, but "Journey to the West", maybe the most famous story in all of East Asia?

The key idea of this app is that given an explanation of every necessary character, word and piece of syntax, everybody can read "Journey to the West". By tapping the words you don’t know (and just … reading the ones you do know), the app explains exactly the amount of context you need. Every single word of the text is annotated with:

• Gloss (what the word means in this context) • Transcription (how it is pronounced) • Grammar (what its role is in the sentence)

Every sentence also comes with an English translation, and difficult passages (like poems) carry additional notes.

The app also includes a hyperlinked etymological character dictionary for every character in the novel, and notes on people, places and cultural concepts referenced.

The whole novel would take ~1,000 pages to print. All the annotations would take an additional ~7,000 pages. The text contains about 20,000 unique words and 4,500 unique Hanzi. If you finish this book, you will have mastered a substantial amount of the Chinese language.

For most learners, this should provide enough material for hundreds of hours of language learning, with zero hours of boredom or rote memorisation: There are no flashcards, no spaced repetition, no streaks and no notifications. Just the annotated original Chinese text. It is still a language-learning app: By letting you choose exactly which parts of a sentence you don't understand, the input tailors itself to your level.