Study Mandarin

Another mandarin study tool

September 2025

I’ve created other mandarin study tools for myself before. The problem I’ve faced with them is that I get too invested in building them and don’t spend as much time using them.

Programming has been an important part of my study journey. Not enough tools out there teach Traditional characters, so writing a program to convert Simplified to Traditional has been very helpful for me. It’s also nice to be able to bring flashcards I’ve made anywhere with me on my phone.

To balance both the usefulness of a custom website and limit my time actually creating that website, I resolved to under-engineer it. No backend, no accounts, no Chrome integrations, no PWA. Just jQuery and HTML.

The site I’ve come up with is a collection of pages meant to keep me on track

• A home page with my daily tasks, study suggestions, links to external tools
• A flashcard page I can bring anywhere that has various sets
• A Zhuyin trainer
• A tool for showing character by character pronunciation to help while reading

Other tools and useful things

• Google Translate and Pinyin Conversion integration so writing flashcards is just copying characters
• A PDF generator for printable flashcards
• It’s very easy to ask an LLM to generate flashcards for a CSV in VSCode