Now on the App Store
MenziMenzi: Learn Chinese
A serious Mandarin Chinese learning app that combines spaced repetition with AI-powered practice — personalized to your exact vocabulary.
Philosophy
The art and science of learning
Menzi is opinionated about how a language gets learned, and everything in the app is downstream of these five. Pick one to see what it means in practice.
Fluency in a bubble, then a bigger bubble
Everything you are asked to read is built from words you already have, plus the one you are learning — the only unknown in the sentence. That makes a small, complete world you can genuinely be fluent inside, and every word you add widens it. Keep going and the bubble is the language.
The next word is the one you keep meeting
Not every word pays the same, so the bubble grows along its most valuable edge. Menzi counts what you actually encounter, tallying what you read apart from what you hear, and opens the word you have met most. A frequency list fills in only where your own reading has not spoken yet.
Words are the primitives; grammar composes them
A sentence is the smallest thing that means anything, and it is built in two layers — words as the primitives, grammar as the operators that combine them. A pattern cannot be learned in the abstract: it needs words to live in, and they have to be yours. Grammar arrives when your vocabulary can carry it, then keeps its own schedule.
A word is not one thing you know
You can read 请 and miss it in speech, or recognise it and never be able to say it. Menzi scores pinyin, hanzi, listening and speaking apart, so they drift — and the drift is the information.
That is what the shape says: 请 reads and means further along than it hears or speaks, and one score would have averaged the gap away.
Using it is how it gets measured
There is no study mode and use mode. Reading a story credits the words in it. A dictation you followed counts toward hearing them. The sentence you write is graded by something that reads it — so what Menzi knows about you came from using the language, never from a test you sat down to take.
Immersive
Where it comes together
Grammar and the Immersion page — chat, transcribe, and read — are where the vocabulary you're drilling gets put to use in something that isn't a flashcard.
Grammar
Patterns are spaced-repetition items in their own right — not grammar notes, drills. Translate into Chinese and out of it, in both directions, and each pattern keeps its own SM-2 schedule and its own difficulty rung, exactly like a word does.
Chat
A real-time conversation with an AI tutor, by text or by voice. Every reply is graded on comprehension and correctness as you go, and — on a spoken turn — on pronunciation too. The tutor writes to the same easy/medium/hard ladder every drill tracks, so the conversation gets harder exactly as fast as you do.
Transcribe
Natural spoken Chinese, generated around the words already in your deck. Type what you hear, and it's graded word by word — the words you catch feed straight back into their Listen axis, so this doubles as a review session that happens to sound like a podcast.
Read
Stories generated from the words you already know, with read-along audio. Nothing outside your vocabulary sneaks into the text, so it stays comprehensible instead of drifting into words you haven't met yet — tap any word in the reader for its pinyin and meaning without losing your place.
Pricing
Casual or Pro
A language model grading every sentence you write and speak isn't free to run — pay for the tool that actually works, however you'd rather pay for it.
Menzi Casual
Monthly$7.99 per month
For ten minutes a day. 8M AI credits a month — about eight graded sentences a day — with the same ten minutes of audio as the free plan.
- 8M AI credits per month
- About 8 graded sentences a day
- 10 minutes of audio per month
Menzi Pro
Monthly$19.99 per month
For daily practice. 20M AI credits and 30 minutes of audio each month — the headroom that matters if you lean on speaking, conversation and generated stories.
- 20M AI credits per month
- About 20 graded sentences a day
- 30 minutes of audio per month
Menzi Casual
Annual$79.99 per year
The same Menzi Casual, paid once a year instead of month to month — $15.89 less than paying monthly across the year.
- 8M AI credits per month
- 10 minutes of audio per month
- One payment, once a year
Menzi Pro
Annual$199.99 per year
The same Menzi Pro, paid once a year instead of month to month — $39.89 less than paying monthly across the year.
- 20M AI credits per month
- 30 minutes of audio per month
- One payment, once a year
Community
Where to find us
Progress updates, sentence breakdowns, and the odd 唐诗 — Discord and YouTube are on the way.
Get Started
Your journey starts today
Every fluent speaker started with one word. Time to learn yours.
Menzi: Learn Chinese