Today, I'm super happy to launch my new iOS app for learning Chinese, 11 years in the making. But before I say more, let me tell you the story of how I got here.

As an English-speaker, Mandarin has a steep learning curve, with its reliance on tones and thousands of characters. My Mandarin-learning journey started 17 years ago, and it was slow-going initially. But as time went on, and I got over the initial hump, things started clicking. At least the grammar is quite simple really, without many irregularities, and once you remember the hundred or so basic components of characters, they become easier to learn as well.

Of course, traveling to China and living in Taiwan for many years also helped a lot; there's nothing like constant immersion to get the brain into gear. But eventually my time there came to an end, and since then I've found it hard to keep the muscle practiced.

So 11 years ago, over a weekend, I built a simple spaced-repetition flashcard app as an initial experiment with React Native. It became, as far as I know, the first React Native app to be published on the iOS app store, outside of Facebook. I wrote a very excited technical blog post about the experience at the time. The post was well-received by the programming community, and a few intrepid Chinese learners even paid the $0.99 to try it out. I was thrilled!

But it didn't help my Chinese very much, I'm afraid. The first version of the app only had relatively simple words. It failed to form a learning habit for me, I never developed it further, and eventually I stopped learning Chinese altogether. But I've always been fascinated by language learning and acquisition, and in the intervening years I have accumulated many thoughts about it. One, which is backed by a lot of science, is that consistency is king. It's far better, in terms of long-term retention, to learn a little bit every day than it is to cram the same amount in a short period of time. Another is that long-tail vocabulary is actually really important. Let me explain.

Another website I developed, a few years before the React Native flashcard app, was called ChineseLevel. It operated on the idea that if you knew the first 1,000 words in order of the frequency that they appear in texts, then you should be able to understand, say, 95% of a newspaper. With 2,000 words, 99%, and so on. So I wrote a little online test you could do to check your level, and then recommended newspaper articles of that approximate complexity, as far as possible. It worked, and proved fairly popular actually.

But it had a fatal flaw: that idea is wrong. Why? Well, it IS true that you would only need to look up maybe 1% of the words in the article, so that is useful, but it is NOT true that you would actually understand 99% of what is written without looking anything up. In fact, you will probably understand around 0%. That's because all the critical information you need for understanding is very likely to be contained in exactly that one word you don't know. In fact, the rarer the word is, the more information it carries! So while learning words in the order of frequency is a reasonable approach, I guess, learning long-tail vocabulary is actually really important for any kind of understanding in real-world situations.

That brings us to the present day. After many years of living in England and not practicing Chinese at all, I wanted to start improving it again, but I wasn't willing to relocate my family to Asia (my kids probably wouldn't have been very thrilled either). So, next best thing, I wanted an app that combined those two insights: consistency, and long-tail vocabulary, so that I can build a habit of learning new words. I've tried flashcard apps like Anki before, and often I would spend a few hours building decks, but then run out of steam actually learning them after a few days. It's especially demotivating if you miss a few days, then come back to a huge backlog of words that would take hours to go through. Often my habit stopped right there.

And that's where Moya Chinese came from. It's a Chinese-learning app for learners that have at least basic familiarity with Chinese, and it helps them build their vocabulary further. It is best paired with some other form of immersion, like classroom learning, videos and movies, or actually visiting places where Mandarin is spoken. For me, that's Chinese TV series—they can be really good!

To make habit-forming natural, the app has some very minimal gamification. You start with a bamboo seedling, and every day you reach your goal, it grows a tiny bit. After a few months of consistent learning, it will grow into a huge, thriving bamboo plant: a visual metaphor for the growing you have been doing yourself. And to add a teeny bit of excitement, the app also rewards you with random items along your journey that you can use to decorate the room around the plant. These gameplay elements are very minimal on purpose: I don't want to waste your time, and the app is focused on learning. It won't have ads, and I want users to only spend a few minutes a day, but every day. Consistency is king.

I also worked out a new spaced repetition algorithm for the app so that you don't get the Anki problem of backlog fatigue. I won't go into the details here, but it's meant to better balance the competing goals of resurfacing words just as you're about to forget them and habit-forming with a constant amount of time spent every day. I relied on the HSK system for determining your approximate level and building relevant vocabulary from there.

If you know anyone learning Mandarin, I'd be very grateful if you told them about Moya Chinese and encouraged them to try it and send me some feedback. I'm actively looking to improve it further, the app even ships with a way to vote on what the next features should be. (You can also vote here.) It's free to download on the Apple App Store. (Sorry Android users: no Android support yet, but you can vote for it on the roadmap).

In any case, even if I remain the only person to ever use this app, I'd still be happy. Throughout the beta-testing period I've built solid recall for hundreds of new words, and it's exciting to recognize them in the series we watch, and know my comprehension is improving. And I'm just as excited to see where this will lead. Thanks for reading, 再见 zàijiàn!