Read & Learn Chinese - DuShu

Mobile Language Learning

In-app purchases

About this app

DuShu is a Chinese Reader that will take any Mandarin Chinese text (via copy&paste or from a file) and present it to you in a way to make it easier to read, but at the same time help you learn as much as possible while reading.

DuShu adds tone colors, underlines that show which characters are part of a word, and pinyin. However, Pinyin is not simply added to every character, but only where you need it - the app keeps track of the characters you know. Pinyin can be turned on or off for a character simply by tapping it.

You can read sentence by sentence, with a vocabulary list below the text, or Chinese text only with the vocabulary on a separate page. The vocabulary list shows only relevant vocab according to your skill level. Words you already know can be removed from the list, the app also keeps track of your known words and will not show known words in vocab lists again.

A translation is available for each sentence - manual translations for our integrated texts, Google Translations for everything else. If your system language isn't English, you can easily switch between English translations and translations into your system language. (Sentence translations are a premium feature - however, as an introductory trial we offer them for free until the end of February 2018).

You can also listen to any text, high quality audio will be created via Google text-to-speech. You'll always be shown only the sentence that is currently being read, plus relevant vocabulary items.

Of course there's an integrated dictionary, which beyond usual dictionary-information also shows the frequency, HSK level and a breakdown into constituent components for characters.

You can save your texts & resume where you left off later, and also get lots of information about your text - like difficulty, how many unique Hanzi (=characters) there are in the text etc.

Everything's highly configurable - which words are be shown in the vocab list, which tone color scheme (or none), pinyin always, never or for unknown characters only, text and pinyin size etc. can all be selected b the user. As it will adapt to your skill level, this Mandarin Chinese Reader can be useful for everybody from beginners to advanced learners.

Statistical and grammar-based analysis makes sure the segmentation into words and annotation with tone colors and pinyin is as accurate as possible.

Texts in traditonal characters are automatically converted to simplified characters. Displaying traditional characters is currently not supported.

In case you don't know what to read, Du Shu features extensive lists of sample sentences for all HSK-levels.

Ratings and reviews

This app is just brilliant. I have been using it daily for a few months to learn Chinese and I just can't stop praising it. I bought the premium package for more stroke order but I can see myself using more of it. I especially like the vocab review where you see the words with the passage you read it in. There are still some desired features but overall it is invaluable in my learning Chinese. This is one of those apps that you just feel happy after each use. And, that's everyday!

I've been struggling in my beginning mandarin class in high school, so I knew if I wanted to pass I needed to study intensively at home. I looked around everywhere, and I found this. This app can really help you learn. It gives you a sentence, and you can click on the characters for an individual definition, you can translate the whole sentence too. It gives you a link to the stroke order to make me a hanzi, where you can practice writing the chinese symbols correctly, which is amazing. With the premium bundle for a low cost, you have infinite practices and exercises, which can help you retain the information. I am going to use this for now on, and probably forever until I am advanced enough in Chinese.

It's simply amazing. Everything I could ever want to study reading Chinese characters, and I love the color coding for tones. Helps so much. The progress percentage helps me stay motivated and move forward (I'm pretty lazy with studying). Edit: for the free version, it would be nice to be able to choose which ten sentences I want translated rather than it just be the first ten after opening the app.

What's new

Audio recordings for HSK 1 Sentences introduced (Google text-to-speech still used for the rest)