Softlaunching my Chinese App

Towards the end of 2024, my Chinese learning hit a wall. I could hold a basic conversation, but my vocabulary was too limited to express myself the way I could in English. I needed a way to learn new words—but the words I wanted to learn, not whatever Duolingo decided to show me next.

Anki seemed like a good fit. It's the standard for memorizing vocabulary. But I hate flashcards. I don't like making them, and self-grading doesn't give me the feedback I need.

The original idea for Bookchoy was simple: a dictionary app with built-in SRS that could generate interactive quizzes instead of traditional flashcards.

Then I realized another problem: I don't always know which words I need to learn next. So I've built vocabulary lists for topics like food, travel, computer programming, and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I plan to expand these into mini-courses for whatever topics people find interesting.

Lists can be boring though. One of the most effective language learning strategies is Comprehensible Input: consuming content you can mostly understand—movies, shows, books, songs, podcasts.

Reading

Reading builds character recognition and expands your vocabulary naturally. You'll also start picking up grammar patterns passively.

Bookchoy has a small library of built-in stories, but the real power is importing your own. Paste any Chinese text into the app, and Bookchoy makes it readable with interactive dictionary lookup and in-depth explanations of sentences and words in context.

You can also import ePub files for full books. I'll eventually expand this to PDF and Mobi.

Making it easy to save words while reading is what transformed Bookchoy from a dictionary app into an e-reader. Chinese has a lot of ambiguity—figuring out where words start and end isn't obvious:

我喜欢学习中文。

There are no spaces. Where does 喜欢 start? Where does 学习 end?

I developed a custom algorithm and a small AI model that runs on-device to handle this. It can also disambiguate characters with multiple meanings and pronunciations:

把面条拉成长条

成长 (chéng zhǎng) means "to grow," but here we actually have 成 "to become" + 长条 (cháng tiáo) "long strip."

Bookchoy handles most cases correctly. I'm still refining it.

Watching

Bookchoy has a built-in YouTube player with interactive subtitles. Tap any word to see its meaning and pronunciation, with the same in-depth explanations as the reader.

Eventually, I'll release a Chrome extension for YouTube, Netflix, Bilibili, Disney+, iQiyi, and more—same interactive subtitles, same vocabulary collection.

Listening

Listening practice matters too. I plan to add a podcast player and audio recordings for built-in stories. I might even support generating audiobooks for imported content.

For now, listening is limited to the YouTube player and audio playback for individual words and sentences.

Studying and Reviewing

Repetition is what makes words stick. Bookchoy uses Spaced Repetition (SRS)—the same science-backed approach used by most language apps. Each time you review a word, the interval before you see it again increases. You review right before you'd forget, which helps cement it in long-term memory.

Current review activities:

• Multiple choice — test pronunciation and meaning
• Fill in the blank — learn how words are used in context
• Sentence drills — translate English prompts into Chinese using a keyboard or word bank
• Writing practice — open-ended prompts with feedback on grammar and word choice