Kylin: Learn Chinese HSK

Kylin teaches Mandarin Chinese from your first character, in your own language. It follows the HSK 3.0 syllabus (published in November 2025, in force since July 2026) across three levels: 1,011 words, 655 simplified characters, 46 grammar patterns and 22 short stories. All of HSK 1 is free.

ONE LESSON A DAY
Each lesson is built around a scene from daily life, like saying hello, buying things or asking the way. There are 68 scenes across the three levels. You meet a new word once with multiple choice. After that the answer has to come from you, said out loud or written by hand. Get one wrong and you see the right word, its meaning, and a short story with a paper-cut picture that ties the character's parts to its meaning.

WRITE IT, HEAR IT
Stroke order is animated for every character. The 250 or so characters on the HSK writing lists (95 of them in HSK 1) you write with your finger, stroke by stroke, and every stroke is checked. Every word has audio, tones are drilled in pairs, and a listening drill plays a word with nothing on screen but the choices.

READ STORIES
Each of the 22 stories is written for its level. Show or hide the pinyin and the meaning of each line, and tap any word for its meaning or to save it to your notebook.

LANTERN RIDDLES
Every day, up to five paper lanterns hide the words you are closest to forgetting. Pick the right meaning and the lantern lights up. Play as often as you like: the game never changes your reviews.

HSK PRACTICE
Preparing for the HSK? The HSK tab has timed practice papers for each level, and drills for each part of the paper. They are practice built from what Kylin teaches and scored against our own mark, not the HSK test.

NO STREAK TO PROTECT
Miss a day and nothing breaks. Your reviews move, and the app stays quiet about it. Spaced repetition brings each word back shortly before you would forget it, and instead of a streak, a paper window flower is cut piece by piece as the words of a level hold. Progress you can prove, not a streak you protect.

MADE OF PAPER
Every screen is a layered paper-cut scene, by day and by night, with quiet sounds you can turn off.

IN YOUR LANGUAGE, OFFLINE
Meanings, character stories, grammar notes and story translations are written in English, Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Indonesian, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, Italian, French and Turkish. The whole course is on your phone, audio included, so it works without a connection. No account needed.

FREE AND PRO
HSK 1 is free with no time limit: 300 words, 248 characters, 14 patterns and 8 stories, with its practice papers. Kylin Pro opens HSK 2 and HSK 3: 711 more words, 407 more characters, 32 more patterns, 14 more stories and their practice papers. Pay once, or pay monthly.

Kylin is an independent app by IOCODO LLC. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by any HSK exam body. Dictionary meanings come from CC-CEDICT (CC BY-SA 4.0), stroke order from Make Me a Hanzi (Arphic Public License) and component data from the same project (GNU LGPL 3.0). All three are credited in the app.

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