Mandarin Chinese (普通话)
Polygloat is a comprehensible input app for Mandarin Chinese. You watch short videos in Mandarin, hold any word in the subtitles for its pinyin and meaning, and the app tracks the words you have met so it can pick videos you are ready for.
The characters are there when you want them and never in your way when you do not.
Most learners hit the same wall: the spoken language and the written one have to be learned in parallel. You can know that a word means something and still not recognise it on screen, or recognise the character and not catch it when someone says it at speed.
Flashcards handle characters in isolation, which is why so many learners can read a word on a card and miss it in a sentence. Tones make it worse — a syllable heard out of context is much harder to place than the same syllable inside a phrase you already half understand.
Watching solves the parallel problem, because the sound, the characters and the meaning arrive together in one sentence. Polygloat's part is making sure that sentence is one you can mostly follow.
Subtitles are segmented into words, not left as an undivided string of characters. Holding one shows the pinyin and what it means in this sentence, so you learn the pronunciation and the sense together.
Every word carries both forms. Read 简体 or 繁體 throughout, and the per-character information follows the script you picked.
If a whole line goes past you, hold the translate icon and the sentence appears translated. The point is to stay in the video rather than open a translation app and lose the thread.
The app records which words you looked up and which you watched past. That word-by-word picture of your vocabulary is what it uses to pick what you see next.
A word you are due to see again comes back in a different sentence from a different speaker, days later — the spacing of a review schedule without a deck to work through. The subtitles colour each word by where it stands: new, learning or due for review.
Set a daily goal of a few minutes for each language and keep a streak going. Rest days mean one missed day does not have to end it.
No. Hold any word for its pinyin and meaning, so you can follow along by sound while the characters become familiar through repeated exposure rather than through drilling them in isolation.
Both. Each word carries a Simplified and a Traditional form, and you read in whichever script you choose. The app interface is also available in both.
Indirectly, and that is the honest answer. Polygloat is not a pronunciation trainer — it does not score your speech. What it gives you is a lot of Mandarin you can follow, with pinyin a press away, which is how tone patterns become recognisable in connected speech rather than in isolation.
Polygloat does not teach to the HSK syllabus or track HSK levels. It builds listening comprehension and vocabulary from real speech, which supports exam preparation without replacing it.
For Mandarin, word meanings and sentence translations come in English, Spanish and Dutch. The app itself is available in 18 languages, including Chinese in both Simplified and Traditional script.
Polygloat is free to download and use on Google Play and the App Store.
