JinbuPal is a Chinese learning web app that helps you quickly master the most common Chinese characters and recognize 95% of real content. JinbuPal uniquely enhances learning for maximized progress by allowing effortless personalization of your daily study.

Hey Product Hunt! I’m Mike, CEO and Co-Founder of JinbuPal 👋. I am very excited to be sharing JinbuPal v2.0 with you today. We initially launched JinbuPal in February 2021 without having been a part of the Product Hunt community, so we are really looking forward to debuting our Version 2.0 with you today! I’ll be here to address any feedback or questions you may have. I’m so excited to see what the Product Hunt community does with JinbuPal, because when I dreamed up with concept, I was just another maker like you. I was getting my electronic hardware product manufactured in China and I wanted to quickly get a grasp of some Chinese foundational content so I could utilize it in my business. I'm sure that a lot of people who are interested in Chinese feel the way I did at the time, that it would be too difficult to be worth my effort. But once it was revealed to me that I could recognize 80% of Chinese after just learning 600 characters (that's close to the number of characters just in this paragraph!), I was instantly motivated and excited. I wanted to bring this same excitement and empowerment to all who never thought learning Chinese could be possible for them. Who is JinbuPal for? - JinbuPal brings an approach to language learning for those with an analytical mindset and a desire to let their curiosity guide their study. Our most avid users have been students and professionals in technical fields who have a strong desire to “hack” Chinese learning. To us, learning Chinese with confidence is a race to learn foundational knowledge as fast as possible. JinbuPal confronts you with the most important 1,500 characters and equips you with everything you'd ever want to digest this information quickly, with the freedom to effortlessly personalize your own approach. Both complete beginners and experienced Chinese learners alike can find something to enjoy by learning with JinbuPal. ⭐️ New for Version 2.0: - New layout with Discover, Learn, and Review modes. - Updated for support 1,500 character and 4,600+ words for a total of 95% recognition of Chinese characters by frequency and 90% knowledge of Chinese words in context. - Major UI upgrades through the app, updating the look and feel of JinbuPal. - The new JinbuPal Chrome Extension allows you to analyze native Chinese content online using your JinbuPal account data. Quickly discover what percentage of Chinese you already recognize on any given webpage. ⭐️ Overall JinbuPal Features: - Endless flexibility for customized Chinese study with various filters, sorting, and display modes. - Boost confidence with real time feedback of your progress for how much Chinese you already can recognize in the real world. 🧧 Our offer to the Product Hunt community - First month free or first 6 months at 50% off! Use code JIAYOU23 or PHLAUNCH50 at checkout for each deal, respectively. Let 2023 be the year you learn Chinese! We gladly welcome your feedback in this comments thread. Additionally, if you’d like to discuss your Chinese learning or JinbuPal further, for a limited time you can even request a free one on one meeting with me through the JinbuPal app menu pane. I look forward to speaking with you if you're interested!

@mkenny Hi Mike! JinbuPal looks good - I just checked out the website and have shared it with some of my students who were looking for a new challenge after French. Really curious about the name, though. Is there a story behind it? 😀

@geetanjalishrivastava Thanks Geetanjali! I appreciate you sharing JinbuPal with your students! That's a great question! JinbuPal was created with the primary goal of helping Chinese learners feel maximum progress as they tackle the challenging task of learning Chinese characters. We believe that feeling continual progress is the most important factor for building confidence in your language learning. This is because feeling substantial progress inspires you to continue your study and enjoy the learning process even more, allowing you to reach high proficiency levels far more quickly. We wanted our name to reflect this vision, so we started with the Chinese word 进步 (pronounced jìnbù) meaning "to progress, to improve". So the name JinbuPal is intended to roughly convey the idea "Progress Pal" or "Progress Buddy".

@mkenny I love the story! It's my personal dream to build an app for French language learners (even though the market is super-crowded), so your story is quite a motivation right now to not let go off that dream.

Congratulations on the launch. Would love to know how you tackle intonations and accents in Mandarin, given there are so many ways in which it can be difficult to map into an app experience.

@uttiya_roy Thanks for your interest! You’d be surprised! It’s actually quite simple to properly convey tones through an app just by using audio and the Mandarin Chinese romanization system called pinyin. However, learning to replicate the tones as a learner and training your ear to hear them is the part that takes practice. Each character card in JinbuPal has audio recordings to help you become familiar with proper pronunciation. Additionally we include a section of in our onboarding which allows users to visually see a graph of the four tones in comparison. You can not only visually see the difference, but you can also listen to each of them side-by-side for comparison. Mastering the tones can certainly be a challenge of learning Chinese, but you start to grasp them pretty quickly once you hear them compared against each other enough times.

@mkenny Sounds cool. I'd give it a shot :D

Hey! I'm David, CTO and co-founder of JinbuPal. It has been a pleasure working on this project and getting it to place to share with the world. I think we've built a product that will resonate with a lot of other makers on PH. It gives the self-motivated learner the tools to chart their own course as they learn Chinese. I didn't know anything about the language when I first started working with Mike and it has helped me to jumpstart my own journey to learn Chinese. Please check it out and let us know if you have any feedback!

JinbuPal

Learning Chinese doesn’t have to be difficult

JinbuPal

Learning Chinese doesn’t have to be difficult

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