Zhen: Mandarin Tone Coach

Most apps score tones one syllable at a time. Real Mandarin does not work that way — and neither does Zhen.

你好 is not pronounced nǐ hǎo. A native speaker says ní hǎo, and almost no app will tell you that.

That gap — between the tone the dictionary writes and the tone people actually say — is where most learners quietly get stuck. Zhen is built around closing it.

HEAR WHICH SYLLABLE WAS WRONG Read a sentence aloud and see your pitch drawn against the target, syllable by syllable. Not a single percentage for the whole sentence: the exact character, the direction your voice went, and what to change.

GRADED THE WAY PEOPLE SPEAK Zhen applies Mandarin tone sandhi before it scores you. Third tone before third tone, the half-third that never rises, 不 before a fourth tone, 一 before anything — all of it. Say 你好 correctly as ní hǎo and you are marked correct, which is not true of an app comparing you to dictionary tones.

FLUENCY, NOT JUST SYLLABLES A separate score for how your pitch moves between syllables, so you can tell correct-but-robotic from natural. This is the part that makes a sentence sound Chinese, and the part almost nothing else measures.

PRACTICE THAT FOLLOWS YOUR MISTAKES Every syllable you get wrong becomes a review card — drilled in the sentence you missed it in, because a tone depends on what surrounds it. Your review queue is a map of your actual weak spots, not a preset deck.

EVERYTHING ON YOUR DEVICE Speech scoring and conversation practice run entirely on your iPhone. No account, no subscription, no server. It works in aeroplane mode, and your recordings never leave the phone — because they are never sent anywhere.

ALSO INSIDE • A 120,000-entry Chinese-English dictionary that shows where the spoken reading differs from the written one • Stroke-order animation for 2,900+ characters • HSK 1–6 vocabulary, introduced so each new word adds as little new material as possible • Everyday roleplay scenarios: ordering food, directions, shopping, the doctor

Built for adult learners working through HSK 1–5, and especially for anyone who has plateaued around HSK 3 and suspects their tones are the reason.