One person, a language he grew up in, and the small questions nobody writes down

Who writes this

My name is Chen. I grew up speaking Mandarin and I live in Chongqing. I have watched enough friends abroad start Chinese and quit inside a month to have an opinion about why.

The short version: they quit because nothing they found could answer a small, specific question. Not "how do I learn Chinese" — that question has a thousand answers and none of them are usable at 11pm. The question is "why does 不 change tone in 不是 and 不对", and the answer is a rule nobody writes down because every native speaker absorbed it before they could read.

That gap is what this site is for.

What is here

Free tools, all of which run in your browser:

• A pinyin chart with 374 clickable syllables, audio on each one.
• A tone test that scores your ear in ten questions, no signup.
• 642 phrase cards across everyday themes, tap to hear.
• A stroke order tool that prints practice sheets.
• About 500 everyday phrases, sorted by situation rather than alphabet.

Behind those, thirty-odd written pages on tones, characters, numbers, names and the questions learners actually ask. I would rather have forty pages that hold up than six hundred that repeat each other.

How the material gets made

Three rules I try to keep:

• Numbers are counted, not estimated. If a page says 642 cards, there are 642 cards in the file. If it says 52 grammar points, someone counted them.
• Examples are things people say. A textbook sentence like 这是书 ("this is a book") teaches you the grammar pattern and nothing about the language. Where I can, the example is a sentence you would actually hear.
• The tools run on your machine. The tone test, the name generator and the stroke sheets are plain client-side JavaScript. Nothing you type is sent to a server, and there is no account behind any of it.

What this site is not

• Not a school. You get no certificate, and nothing here counts toward an HSK score.
• Not a fluency promise. You will not speak Chinese in thirty days, and any page that says so is selling something.
• Not affiliated with anyone. Not with Hanban, not with any publisher, not with the apps I occasionally compare against. When a book or a tool gets recommended here, nobody paid for the mention.

If something here is wrong

It happens. A tone mark in the wrong place, a translation that is technically correct and idiomatically dead, a phrase that is fine in Chengdu and odd in Beijing.

Email me and tell me which page. I fix it, and when the correction changes how a rule reads, I note it on the page instead of quietly swapping the text. Corrections from native speakers and from teachers who use this with students are the most useful mail I get.