Hear it. Say it. Keep it.

Mandarin Chinese in both Simplified and Traditional (Taiwan standard), with more in the works. Each language is a separate track with its own progress.

No. Settings lets you set your level directly on whichever word list you're climbing — the high-frequency band, HSK, TOCFL or your own. Pick HSK 3 and HSK 1 and 2 are marked known, so you start where you actually are instead of at word one.

From there, one dial sets how much of your new material comes from your word list versus from things you've added yourself — lean entirely on your own imports if you'd rather. And everything in your Library shows what share of its words you already know, so you can pick material at the edge of your ability rather than working up from the bottom.

Yes. Level 1 of the high-frequency band starts at the very beginning, every word comes with audio and pinyin, and Patterns covers the beginner sentence frames as you meet them. Out of the box, the ladder has you listen first and speak second, the way you'd learn by ear — and when you practise saying a word, you see your pitch drawn against the tone you were aiming for.

People who need to talk: travelers, expats, anyone with family or friends they'd rather speak Mandarin with. Everything here optimizes for understanding and being understood in real conversation, so if your goal is the dinner table or the ticket counter, this is built for you.

Studying for the HSK or TOCFL? The official word lists are built in, and the ladder drills their words through listening and speaking — plus reading and writing if you add them, in whatever order suits you — so you arrive at the exam able to use the vocabulary, not just recognize it. Turn on Write and each character is graded stroke by stroke.

The scheduling is the same idea — LinguaBattle uses FSRS, the algorithm modern Anki uses — but what gets tested isn't. A flashcard tests recognition: you see a word and try to remember what it means. Here a word works through up to four skills — Listen, Speak, Read and Write, switched on and put in whatever order suits you. Each skill gets its own schedule, and a word moves on to the next once it's holding steady in the one before.

Core training runs on-device, offline. The free AI features, like Scenarios and Ask AI, run on a language model on your phone: Apple Intelligence on iPhones that support it, or a free model you download once (about 3 GB), after which they work offline too. Cloud features (Journeys, cloud AI, sync, premium voices) need a connection.

Yes — Scenarios put you in goal-driven dialogues with an AI partner, speaking drills grade your pronunciation and recall automatically, and every part of the app has a battle mode you pass by ear and voice alone.

There's no magic number, and we won't invent one. Two things the research is clear on: short regular sessions beat occasional long ones — the same spacing effect the review engine is built on — and balance beats volume, with input, study, speaking and speed each needing their share.

In practice: a daily review session keeps the schedule honest, and a battle or a Journey part fits whenever you have a little longer.

Nothing is lost. Your cards, your Library and your history stay on the device, and you carry on training on the free tier with exactly the same data — cloud sync and the Cloud AI features are what stop, not your progress. You can also export your cards to Anki whenever you like, on either tier.