Learn Mandarin by speaking. reading. understanding.
Conversation practice, graded reading, and characters that make sense — all adapting to your level. Piloting now with Confucius Institute students.
Academic
Presented at CCCM Macau — March 2026
"Synthetic Interaction: Design and Evaluation of a Large Language Model Interlocutor for Mandarin Learners"
Press
Hoje Macau — March 27, 2026
"IA que ajuda a comunicar em mandarim" ↗
"AI that helps you communicate in Mandarin"
Institutional
Confucius Institute — Pilot, April 2026
Pack alignment to the Standard Course textbook.
Why flashcards aren't enough
Existing apps teach you to recognize characters.
Mingdao teaches you to use them.
Duolingo, HackChinese, Anki — they're all optimized for recognition. Drill a card, see it again tomorrow, remember it next week. But remembering is not the same skill as speaking.
You can finish a year of flashcards and still freeze the first time a waiter asks you a question.
Mingdao starts from the conversation. You talk to an AI tutor through scenarios from the HSK syllabus. It scores your pronunciation character by character, corrects grammar in a side panel without interrupting you, and uses what you struggle with to generate the exercises you need next.
How it works
Three ways to learn. One system that connects them.
Real conversations.
Corrections that don't interrupt.
You talk your way through scenarios from the HSK syllabus — ordering food, asking directions, meeting someone. Every tone is scored, character by character.
The conversation is the assessment.
Stories at your level.
Every word tappable.
AI-generated stories matched to the words you already know, with a few stretch words threaded in. Tap any character for instant dictionary lookup.
Every story is new. You'll never re-read the same paragraph twice.
Characters that
make sense.
You don't memorize 300 arbitrary shapes. You understand a system.
Tap any character to see how it's built and how it connects to the others you already know.
The skill model
Four skills. Tracked separately.
A single "intermediate" score tells you nothing. Mingdao tracks four skills per word and shows you where the gap is.
Speech
Can you pronounce it with the right tones?
Vocabulary
Do you know what the word means in context?
Grammar
Can you use it correctly in a sentence?
Character
Can you read the character on sight?
The skill you're worst at is the one Mingdao shows you most.
Your curriculum, your pace
Learn what you're actually studying.
Mingdao organizes vocabulary into packs — one for each lesson of the HSK Standard Course, plus thematic packs for whatever you're curious about.
Pick the pack you need. Your flashcards, stories, and conversations all draw from those words.
Every Standard Course lesson, packed.
HSK 1 through 5 — 55 lessons, ready to subscribe. Browse by theme if you'd rather learn by topic.
Subscribe to what you're studying this week. Move on when you're ready.
Be in the next wave.
We're running the beta in small invite waves. Drop your email and we'll send yours when the next one opens.
Free during the beta. Works best for HSK 1–5 learners.