A few years ago I had the opportunity to study in China at Tsinghua University with my good friend Clément (the other maker)
We both fell in love with the country, he stayed there and I came to France for a bit. I knew I was going to travel back to China at some point and live there for a while.
I wanted a way to keep practicing my Chinese a little bit each day, at least keep in touch with the language.
I found various books, podcasts, and apps but I could not always make up time for it. We knew we spent countless hours on our computer because both of us are software engineer, so we built a simple tool with a simple promise
🇨🇳 Every time we open a new tab you get a new Chinese character to practice
Of course, you can do more than that
- You can get the pinyin and English definition.
- You can listen to native people pronouncing the character out loud to perfect your tones.
- You get a small list of Chinese/English sentences using that specific character so you learn with context.
- You can practice your drawing and stroke order as well.
- We highlight the root of each character.
- Finally, you can choose the HSK levels you want to practice and we will only pick Chinese characters from this dataset.
- We also included a list of the best resources to dive deeper into Chinese
💻 Technology Stack
I know some people like to know the stack that was used so here it is
- Svelte
- Rollup
- Tailwind CSS
It was the first time we built a browser extension, we had never used Svelte or Rollup before. So the code might be a bit rusty, but here it is!
🧧 Get in touch
If for some reasons you want to get in touch with us you can at hello@hzxiaobai.org
We hope you enjoy it and have as much fun learning Chinese as we do!
My Canadian boyfriend finally started to love to learn Chinese after I had recommended Hanzi Xiaobai to him. I would recommend to any Chinese who want their boyfriend or girlfriend to start to learn more about the Chinese language and culture!