Zhen (真中文) · iOS 26 or later · Last updated 28 July 2026

Contact: [email protected] — please include your iPhone model and iOS version.

What Zhen does differently

Most apps score Mandarin tones one syllable at a time. Zhen scores them the way they are actually spoken, applying tone sandhi first — so 你好 is graded as ní hǎo, not nǐ hǎo. If you are marked wrong on a syllable you are sure you said correctly, the sandhi section below is the first place to look.

Frequent questions

I said 你好 with two third tones and it marked 你 wrong. Isn't that how it's written?

That is how it is written, and not how it is said. A third tone before another third tone becomes a second tone, so 你好 is pronounced ní hǎo. Zhen grades against what a native speaker produces, which is the whole point of the app. The same applies to:

• 不 before a fourth tone → bú (不是 = bú shì)
• 一 before a fourth tone → yí (一个 = yí gè); before other tones → yì
• a third tone before any non-third tone → a low half third, which drops and stops rather than dipping and rising again

Tap the reading under any sentence to see which rule applied.

My scores seem harsh.

Check three things first.

1. Record somewhere quiet. Pitch tracking needs a clean signal; background noise and the pitch curve gets noisy with it.
2. Speak at a normal volume, close to the phone. Very quiet or creaky speech gives the analyser too little voiced audio to measure.
3. Read the whole sentence in one breath. Flow is scored separately from Tones. Each syllable can be correct while the sentence still sounds disconnected — that is what a low Flow score with a high Tones score means.

The per-syllable chart shows your pitch against the target. If your curve has the right shape but a much smaller range, you are on the right track and under-articulating; if it goes the other way, the tone itself is wrong.

"AI conversation unavailable" / it says the model is still downloading.

The conversation partner uses Apple Intelligence. It needs an iPhone 15 Pro or later, iOS 26, and Apple Intelligence switched on in Settings › Apple Intelligence & Siri. It is also unavailable in some regions and system languages.

Where it is unavailable, Zhen falls back to a scripted conversation partner and says so on the Today screen. Everything else — scoring, the dictionary, review — works normally.