Kylin starts at your first character and takes you through HSK 1, 2 and 3, on the syllabus published in November 2025. You read it, you hear it, you write it stroke by stroke. Spaced repetition brings each item back at the moment it would otherwise slip. No streaks.
Your recall right now
78%
of HSK 1
Measured from your own reviews, and checked against surprise questions so it stays honest.
茶
tea
Chinese punishes the app that teaches you something once and moves on. Kylin is tuned for what you can still recall next month, from your first character to the end of HSK 3.
You trace each of the 655 characters in the correct stroke order and the app grades the strokes. The animation is there when you ask for it, rather than playing at you.
A modern spaced-repetition scheduler brings each word back just before you would forget it. An item leaves the queue when your recall is stable, not because you got it right once.
Naming one tone in isolation is the easy version. Kylin samples across the whole matrix of tone pairs, because the errors that survive are the ones between two tones in a row.
Characters are taught in the order their components allow, so a new one is usually pieces you already know. Where a component hints at the sound, the app says how often that hint holds.
Full pinyin, then the tone mark alone, then the bare character. The fade happens per character as you master it, driven by your recall rather than a switch or a timer.
Progress is a percentage you can prove, not a counter you defend. Miss a week and the number moves down honestly, then the app hands you a plan instead of a guilt screen.
HSK 3.0 was published in November 2025 and takes effect in July 2026. Its per-level word counts differ from the older standard that most published lists still follow, so these are the words the exam will actually test.
HSK 1
The whole level, with its grammar, its reader and every stroke animation. Free, with no account and no time limit.
HSK 2
Sentence patterns start carrying real weight here, and reading passages grow past single lines.
HSK 3
The largest jump of the three. By the end you are reading paragraphs rather than decoding them.
Glosses, mnemonics and grammar notes are written in the language you choose, not machine-translated from English at the last minute. The tone drills also change, because which tones trip you up depends on the language you grew up with.
See it, hear it spoken, and see the parts it is built from. Where a component tells you something about the sound or the meaning, Kylin says so and says how reliable that is.
Multiple choice happens once, the first time you meet an item. After that you recall it: the reading, the tone, and the character traced in the right order.
Reviews arrive when they are worth doing, and the home screen tells you what you would recall today. Surprise checks on things the scheduler thinks are safe keep that figure from flattering you.
Kylin starts you at zero. You meet a character, hear it spoken, see the components it is built from, and trace it in the right stroke order. Words, tones and grammar build from there through HSK 1, 2 and 3.
HSK 1 is free in full: all 300 words, all 246 characters, its grammar and its reader. Kylin Pro opens HSK 2 and HSK 3, as a subscription or a one-time lifetime purchase. Prices are shown in the app in your own currency before anything is charged.
The HSK 3.0 syllabus published in November 2025, which takes effect in July 2026. Its word counts differ from the older 2021 standard that most published word lists still use, so the levels in Kylin are the ones the exam will actually test.
Yes. Every lesson, character, stroke animation and audio clip ships inside the app, and the scheduler runs on your device. Nothing is downloaded while you study.
English, Vietnamese, Thai, Korean and Indonesian. Glosses, mnemonics and grammar notes are written in the language you pick rather than translated on the fly.
No. The home screen shows how much of a level you would recall right now, computed from your own review history. Miss a week and the number tells you the truth instead of taking something away from you.
Yes. You trace every character in the correct stroke order and the app grades the strokes. Tones are drilled as pairs, because the hard part is telling two tones apart in sequence rather than naming one on its own.
Simplified, which is what HSK uses. Traditional is not in the app today.
Free to start, fully offline, and calm by design. Kylin is on its way to iOS and Android, with the whole of HSK 1 free.
Kylin includes open reference material that its licences require us to credit, here and inside the app.
CC-CEDICT, a community Chinese to English dictionary, used for definitions and readings, under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0.
Make Me a Hanzi, used for stroke order and character decomposition. Copyright 1999 Arphic Technology Co., Ltd. and copyright 2016 Shaunak Kishore, under the Arphic Public License.
Kylin is an independent app from IOCODO LLC. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by any HSK examination body.
