Mencius

Read 99% of everyday Chinese.

Learn the 3,000 characters that matter, in the order they actually appear in real text. A few minutes a day. Free to start.

Download on the App Store
The lock-screen widget showing a new character
A flashcard with Hard and Easy buttons
Chinese text scanned, pinyin above each character and English below
The Discover feed, characters in frequency order
A passage with pinyin above every character
An HSK word with its pinyin and meaning
A character page: meaning, example words and how it is built
Writing practice, tracing a character stroke by stroke
Beat the Brush: naming a character as it is written
The home-screen widget showing a character

的 #1

The right order

Textbooks teach by topic. Real Chinese is skewed: 100 characters cover 43% of text, 500 cover 78%, 1,000 cover 90%. Mencius teaches in that order, so reading starts early.

忘 wàng · forget

Reviews that land on time

The same spaced-repetition scheduler as Anki. Each character comes back just before you'd forget it, so you spend minutes, not hours.

读 dú · read

Reading from day one

Short passages written only with the characters you've learned. Tap any character to open it. Pinyin and English stay hidden until you ask.

Three thousand characters, one at a time,
in the order that pays off soonest.

Download on the App Store Free to start. Premium unlocks the full deck, writing practice and games.