Learn Chinese
Chinese has no alphabet, so the on-ramp is pinyin — the Latin spelling that tells you how a syllable sounds and, with its tone mark, what pitch to say it on. iLexiBox starts there, with the initials that pinyin does not use the way an English reader expects, and with the four tones, because in Chinese the tone is part of the word rather than an ornament on it.
Start at pinyin and the tones
The Chinese on-ramp is written by hand, not generated, and it is 189 cards long. Every card is spoken in a recorded Chinese voice, and what you get right is scheduled for review rather than shown again at random.
- 27pinyin sounds
- 10digits
- 12pronunciation rules
- 100core words
- 20everyday phrases
- 20sentences
Three of the pronunciation cards, exactly as the course teaches them:
- mā 妈 — high and flat — hold one note, like singing it妈妈 — mother
- má 麻 — rising, the way an English question rises at the end麻烦 — trouble / a hassle
- mǎ 马 — dips low, then comes back up — the longest of the four马上 — right away
Then material that does not run out
Once you are reading, the level is the point. Make a text writes Chinese at the CEFR level, length, topic and format you ask for, so the step up is a setting rather than a new book. Speaking scores you word by word as you read aloud. Lexi talks back. The Translator fixes your mistakes as it translates and can give a simpler version at your level, and Writing marks what you wrote and says why.
Above the on-ramp sits the Course — a map of practice steps from A1 to C2 with grammar, vocabulary and a level test at the top of each level — and My words, where everything you save comes back on a spaced-repetition schedule in eight quiz styles.
2,720 photographs, 2,707 of them captioned in Chinese
The album is a photograph for every word, shelved by category, each caption written in Chinese and spoken in a real recorded voice rather than synthesised on the fly. It doubles as a game: see the picture, spell the word. Free to replay.
What Chinese actually costs a beginner
mā, má, mǎ and mà are four different words — mother, hemp, horse and to scold — and only the pitch separates them. A tone is learnable but only by ear, which is why every card carries a recorded voice. Pinyin's own trap is that several of its letters do not say what they look like: zh, ch, sh and r are made with the tongue curled back, c is a ts, and q and x have no English equivalent at all. Characters are taught where they belong — inside the words, phrases and sentences, with the pinyin beside them — rather than as a second alphabet to finish first.
Full courses in English and German (A1–C1); Norwegian growing level by level; first lessons in Spanish; picture album in 37 languages; tools and AI practice in 54.