About Literate Chinese
Literate Chinese is a reading-first Mandarin learning app: 650+ graded stories matched to the words you actually know, smart flashcards that feed your reading, a 173-point grammar library, and full support for both Mainland and Taiwan Mandarin — Simplified and Traditional characters, pinyin and zhuyin.
The idea behind the app, and behind every article on this site, is simple: you learn to read Chinese by reading Chinese — at a level where you understand nearly everything on the page. Flashcards prime words; stories make them permanent.
Ray Banks
Ray Banks is the founder and developer of Literate Chinese. A longtime Mandarin learner, he built the app he wished existed: one that treats reading — not drilling — as the core of learning, and that takes Taiwan Mandarin as seriously as Mainland Mandarin. He writes the guides on this blog, drawing on the app's own corpus of 650+ graded stories (141,000+ character occurrences of reading data) for the numbers you'll see cited in them.
You can find his work on GitHub, or try the app on the App Store and Google Play.
How we write our guides
- Original data first. When we quote numbers — how many characters you need to read a story, which words differ between Taiwan and the Mainland — they come from our own catalog and reviewed lexicon, and we say so.
- Both Mandarins. Guides cover Mainland and Taiwan usage explicitly rather than pretending one is "standard."
- Tested against real learners. The method we recommend is the one the app implements; reader feedback goes straight back into both.
Questions, corrections, or topic requests: literatelanguages@gmail.com.
