Introducing Chinese Reader - a Chinese reading app for Android and iPhone

[kangrepublic]

Hi everyone,

 

Chinese Reader is an app I’ve been working on to provide some fresh and interesting reading content for Chinese learners.

 

The app aims to provide a source of Chinese stories, along with native mandarin recordings and a pop-up dictionary.

 

As well as this it allows you to customize how the text is displayed. You can change the text to be displayed in simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, pinyin only or pinyin on top of characters as well as other formats such as zhuyin and IPA.

 

 

You can find the Android app on the play store here

 

And the iPhone app on the App Store here

 

 

One caveat though, there is only one book to read at the moment and that will probably not change in the near future. I actually released the app earlier this year and planned to add more books to it before publicizing it a bit more. However there is still a fair bit to do in that regard and life and other things got in the way. I have also kind of put the project on hiatus; I was making the project in my spare time and have currently decided to focus on some of my other interests such as fiddling around with artificial intelligence and spending a bit more time on learning Chinese.

 

However, hopefully some of you will still enjoy reading the short story and be able to learn something from it.

 

You can also benefit from multiple readings as you can change the format. So if you’re just starting out you can make use of the pinyin and then later on just use the Chinese characters. Or if you want to make the switch to traditional characters from simplified you can do that too.

 

The audio was purposefully recorded at native speed in order to aid learners to practice at listening to real Chinese at a real pace. You can listen to the audio at the sentence, paragraph and word level and the audio can be repeated as many times as you need if you didn’t quite catch it the first time.

 

The display is fairly customizable so play around with the settings a little to get your preferred look. These can be accessed via a side menu.

 

So please give it a try! It is free to download so there is nothing to lose

 

If you do like the app please give it a rating, that would be super helpful. (A review and a share would be nice too ) Having more ratings and reviews will help others find it in the app stores (and also make me happy ).

 

Also let me know if you have any criticisms of the app. Both positive and negative criticism is welcome. I may not be able to action any of them in the near future but I will take note of them for future consideration.

 

Hope you like it!

[Shelley]

It looks good, was totally intrigued because the example book is by Philip K. Dick one of my favourite authors. Is this book included? If not where can I get it and other scifi. I need to read more and reading something I enjoy even if difficult would make it more enjoyable.

 

I will give it a go.

[kangrepublic]

Yeah that is the book that is included I like him too. I got one of his short stories that was out of copyright translated. I made sure it was a good translation so that the sentences sound native.

 

For other stories, good question! I haven't really looked into it too much before but there is Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin which has been translated to English and is very popular. I want to read it in Chinese but think I will read it in English first. Another set of short stories I have on my wish list is Stories of Your Life: and Others by Ted Chiang who is actually American but it turns out there is a Chinese translation .

 

And I just found this article about Chinese sci-fi. Will have to look into it as it sounds like a good plan for reading practice

 

Maybe someone else can help with where to source the Chinese books. Maybe TaoBao but I haven't used that before. I did see Three Body Problem in Beijing Airport last year. I should have bought it.

[艾墨本]

The scifi article was quite fascinating. Here's one snipped I really enjoyed.

To give a little background, most Chinese literature these days is written in what’s called modern standard written Chinese, which is very different from classical Chinese. It’s a new language as far as literature is concerned. It has a history not much longer than 100 or 120 years.

Because it’s a relatively new language, the literature written in it shows all the same kind of roughness and unsettledness and complexity that you would expect of a vernacular literature still young and in development. Just as English and French literature went through centuries of instability when they were first being written in these vernaculars, as opposed to Latin

[iand]

Isn't modern standard written Chinese based on classic vernacular novels hundreds of years old, which was a rich and vibrant tradition of literature?

[stapler]

I'm really impressed with the audio in this app. I was expecting the usual crappy TTS stuff. Nice to read and listen to it spoken by a real person

[mouse]

I like Ken Liu a lot, but he's completely wrong about Chinese literature. 白話 might have been standardised during in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but as iand points out, Chinese literature based on the vernacular dates back hundreds of years and includes the famous classics of the Chinese novel. Yes, the writing in those works owes something to formal literary Chinese (文言文), but so what? If you read contemporary vernacular works in English, you'll find their language archaic as well. Unless you date vernacular literature as beginning when Chinese writers began to self-consciously imitate and learn from non-Chinese literature, then I don't see how Liu's argument can make sense. And if you do that you're really missing too much of the story.

[mouse]

On topic: I liked your app, kangrepublic, especially the audio aspect. I also liked that it's very customisable. However, unless I've missed something, once you start reading a text, there's no way to return to the main menus without quitting the app. I'd prefer to be able to do this, especially if you ever get the time to add more texts.

[kangrepublic]

Glad you liked it. Whilst reading the text you can drag from the left edge of the screen to open up a side menu in which you can go back to the Library or change the settings. I admit that this isn't that intuitive especially if you're an iPhone user. I originally did this to increase screen space for the text but it would be something I will look at redesigning in a future version.

[mouse]

I'm so dumb, I can't believe I didn't realise that!

 

I guess you could put an icon in the bottom left hand corner of the screen.

[makochan]

kangrepublic, I just loaded the app on my iPhone, and really like what I see so far!  I personally feel this is a much better reading experience than Pleco's document reader.  I hope to spend more time with it and try out all the features.

 

I know you are only working on this project part time, but any chance you might include a feature to be able to import in txt files?