Tim Budong

听不懂 — tīng bù dǒng, “I don’t understand.” The two words you say most. Read a Chinese sentence out loud; every character comes back scored, with the tone you should actually have said.

How it works

1. You get an HSK 1 sentence and a native reading of it. It sounds nothing like you.
2. You read it back. The recording comes back scored character by character, tone by tone.
3. The characters you keep missing are the ones you get again. Tim does not forget.

Tones after sandhi, not from the dictionary

Mandarin changes tones in context, and the dictionary doesn’t say so. Drill against dictionary tones and you get marked wrong for speech that was correct, which is the fastest way to stop believing an app. So every syllable here carries both, and you are graded on the one you have to produce:

你好
say ní hǎo — not the dictionary’s nǐ hǎo

Who Tim is

Tim Budong is you, four tones from now: hood up, nodding along, understanding none of it. He’s not a mascot you graduate from — he’s an accurate account of every conversation you’ve had in Mandarin so far. The scoring underneath him is in earnest. He just refuses to pretend any of this is fun.

Status

Early. The service is up, the mobile client is being built against it, and there is nothing to sign up for yet. Tim is used to waiting.