Learn Chinese through conversation.

The web version of lingotheory is free.

Yes, you can respond with English and begin by listening and asking for explanations of words you don't understand. It will be like speaking with a native speaker right away. Challenging but very rewarding. I would, however, recommend that you learn pinyin or zhuyin separetly as the AI conversations are not designed and capable of providing that type of instruction

Yes! This is in fact the intended method of use. Press the microphone to start recording your voice and press the 'stop recording' button to stop. Speech is converted to text via an advanced AI model. It recognizes a variety of accents and is capable of understanding both English and Chinese speech. It's also a great way to know if your pronunciation is accurate or not. Innacurate pronunciation of chinese words is likely to end up being transcribed incorrectly or even register as a totally different language letting you know that you may need to work on pronunciation.

Only Simplified Mandarin Chinese is currently supported so that I can focus on making the best and most accurate experience possible given the specifics of the language. Other languages may be available soon, send an email to [email protected] if you have a language you would like to see supported

The AI has an excellent handle on language use and will respond naturally like a native speaker would. There are several dimensions to the accuracy of the AI. The error rate for grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary is extremely low beating that of most expert speakers but the error rate in explanation or providing facts is higher. As an example if you ask for a translation the translation will be very accurate but if you ask for an explanation why a given sentence is incorrect it may occasionally provide an erroneous error.

I've not yet built a tool for analyziing pronunciation. Other apps often offer one but they are wildly innacurate especially for Chinese.

You can toggle pinyin on or off from the menu in the upper right corner. It is currently off on default due to some known innacurracies that are being worked on.

The main models used on the backend are state of the art large language models. These models are trained on a vast amount of data and then undergo finetuning, filters, and other process to ensure responses are not inappropriate. That said, due to the nature of LLMs there are usually ways to 'jailbreak' the models and get responses about nearly anything if one tries hard enough. I would suggest that if you are comfortable letting your child use something like chatgpt then this is nearly the same risk profile as it goes through the same providers (OpenAi, microsoft, Google, etc.)

yes and no. The first language tool I built is a flashcards + ai tool that is currently available on Android under the same name 'lingotheory'. The web version of lingotheory builds upon the knowledge I gained building that tool to provide more engaging conversations in a variety of scenarios. This updated version is only available via web at app.lingotheory.com and works well on mobile devices from the chrome or safari browsers.

You can send me an email at [email protected] if you have suggestions, improvements, or want to collaborate. Your feedback means the world to me and helps me improve the app so that everyone can learn Chinese more effectively