Syng

Even if you’re not interested in languages, you can probably imagine that Chinese is pretty difficult to learn. Apart from the characters themselves, it follows entirely different rules than English speakers are used to. Should you want to start learning such a language, you will probably need all the help you can get. Syng is an application that has been developed with this purpose in mind.

Now keep in mind that Syng is, first and foremost, a dictionary and not an app that is supposed to guide your Chinese learning step-by-step. However, it still has many useful tools that perfectly capture the particularities of the Chinese language.

For example, Chinese is very dependent on context. The written monosyllabic characters can have various meanings depending on how they are used (also, they have no inflections such as article, gender or tense). When you search for a word, expression or phrase, Syng won’t try to accurately translate what you wrote, but will actually give you a (usually) long list of words or word combinations that can help you find the meaning you’re looking for.

From the main interface, you can click on any of the results to find more details about them. You can hear how a word is pronounced, then see the characters that it’s made of and learn what other meaning each of them can have.

You can bookmark words and add them to various lists that you create.  You can also see exactly how each character is written in both Simplified and Traditional Chinese. Once you accumulate a considerable amount of words in your list, you can proceed to test your memory

Syng can actually generate quizzes and flashcards to help you study. It also helps you convert traditional Chinese characters to simplified Chinese or vice versa, but it can also change them to pinyin, which is the official conversion of Chinese characters to the Latin alphabet.

While you probably won’t be able to learn Mandarin just by using Syng, it’s certainly a versatile free tool that could come in handy.