An AI Chinese tutor: talk with Mei and get your pronunciation checked

What the AI does in the course

• It listens to what you say. In a lesson you say a phrase out loud, and a speech recognition model writes down what it heard. If the Chinese “listener” understood you, you got it. If not, you see which word it heard instead of the one you meant.
• It talks at your level. Mei leads a scripted dialogue (meeting someone, a café, asking the way) and only uses words from the lessons you have already done. You can answer by voice or with a ready-made reply.
• It corrects and explains. After your line a “better like this” hint appears: the correct version and the reason, in English: what went wrong with the word order, a particle or a measure word.
• It shows every word. Mei’s lines are split into words: tap one to see its pinyin and meaning. They come from the course dictionary, not made up on the fly.

How a conversation with the AI works

1. You pick a situation, and Mei starts right away with her first line: you hear it and see it as text with pinyin.
2. You answer by recording a voice message. If it’s still hard to say, you pick one of the ready-made replies.
3. Mei answers and, if there was a mistake in your sentence, shows “better like this”: the correct version and an explanation in English.
4. At the end of the conversation you get a list of all the corrections, so you can review them.

It’s an exchange of voice messages, taking turns, not a call: you have time to think before each line. Answers arrive in a couple of seconds.

Situations to practice spoken Chinese

AI tutor or native speaker

A human teacher or native speaker is irreplaceable when you need free-flowing speech, culture and the intonation of a real conversation. But in the first months a beginner needs something else: to say the same phrases many times without being shy about mistakes, and to find out right away where the mistake is. That’s where AI is handier: it’s there any time, never tires of repeating and adapts to your vocabulary. A good combination is AI for daily practice and a native speaker or conversation club once you have at least HSK 2 behind you. More on ways to practice in the article “Spoken Chinese”, and ready-made dialogues for beginners in “Chinese dialogues”.

Tones: your own voice on a graph

The tone is part of a Chinese word, and you can’t check yourself by ear. So in the tone trainer your voice turns into a line drawn next to the speaker’s, and you see where your melody went off. This isn’t a neural network but pitch analysis right in your browser: the recording isn’t sent anywhere. Try it in the pronunciation trainer, no sign-up needed; how tones work is explained in the article “Tones in Chinese”.

How this differs from a general chatbot

You can study Chinese in ChatGPT or DeepSeek too, but a chat without a syllabus has weak spots:

• Level. A chatbot answers in “grown-up” language. Mei is limited to the words of the lessons you have done, and the length of her lines and her speed depend on your vocabulary.
• Pinyin and tones. In a general chat the tone mark over a syllable is sometimes wrong. Here the reading of every word comes from the course dictionary, checked by hand, with audio.
• Memory. A chat doesn’t know what you studied yesterday. The course brings words back for review at intervals, just when you start to forget them.
• Syllabus. Behind the conversation are lessons following the HSK 3.0 standard: 5,400 words over six levels, grammar, and characters stroke by stroke.

How to make good use of a general chatbot anyway, with ready-made prompts and a list of what to double-check: the article “Learning Chinese with AI chatbots”.

Where to start

The first lessons are open without signing up: the “Pinyin and tones” section and the first section of HSK 1. A lesson takes five minutes: a word comes up in a dialogue, you build a sentence with it and say it out loud. What each level covers is shown in the word lists: HSK 1, HSK 2, HSK 3.

Frequently asked questions