Read a real Chinese novel

Learning Chinese? Bored of graded readers and learning artificial 你好我叫小明 sentences? What if you could read a real Chinese novel? And not just any novel, but Journey to the West, maybe the most famous story in all of East Asia?

The key idea of this app is that given every necessary word, character and syntactical construction is explained, then everybody can read Journey to the West. By tapping the words you don't know (and just … reading the ones you do know), the app explains as much or as little context as you need. Every single word of the text is annotated with:

• Gloss — what the word means in this context
• Transcription — how it is pronounced in modern Mandarin
• Grammar — what its role is in the sentence

Every sentence also comes with an English translation, and difficult passages (like poems) carry additional notes.

The app also includes a hyperlinked etymological character dictionary for every character in the novel, and notes on people, places and cultural concepts that appear in the novel.

How much is there?

The whole novel would take about 1,000 pages to print. All the annotations would take an additional 7,000 pages. The text contains about 20,000 unique words and 4,500 unique Hanzi. This means that if you finish this book, you will have mastered a substantial amount of the Chinese language.

What it is not

For most learners, this should provide enough material for hundreds of hours of language learning, with zero hours of boredom and rote memorisation: there are no flashcards, no spaced repetition, no streaks and no notifications. Just the annotated original Chinese text. It is still a language-learning app: by letting you choose exactly which parts of a sentence you don't understand, the input tailors itself to your level.