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Learn Chinese the honest way — and pass HSK 3.0.

Gushi turns every character into a story you will not forget, then schedules your reviews with FSRS spaced repetition. The whole nine-level syllabus, with the cards already built.

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A Gushi character card: the drawn picture, the mnemonic story, and how the character behaves in use.
The Gushi Today screen: today's new characters, the cards due for review, the daily goal ring and the streak.
The character page for 和: the pinyin in its tone colour, a play button for the recording, and a Tone 2 label.
Three screens from the running app — a story card, the daily queue, and a character's pronunciation.
Why most people quit

Too gamified, or too much homework.

One kind of app paces you for a daily streak and leaves you unable to read a menu. The other has the best scheduling algorithm in the world and an empty deck — so you quit at deck-building, not at Chinese.

Gushi is the honest middle: the fastest method there is, with the cards already built.

A Chinese hand-scroll: a poem written in cursive brush script on aged paper.

Poem Written in a Boat on the Wu River. Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain.

Where we sit

Between the lesson tree and the empty box.

How the three approaches compare
  Duolingogamified Ankido-it-yourself the whole exam, one system
How you learn A lesson tree of taps, repeating on the tree's schedule Cards you write yourself, scheduled well Finished story cards, scheduled by FSRS — the fastest system there is
Setup before card one None Hours — find a deck, fix it, add audio, write mnemonics, keep it alive None. Every card is already written
What is in it Fixed lessons Whatever you — or a stranger — built 3,088 characters · 10,896 words · 429 grammar points, with stories, pictures, audio and examples
Tones, speaking, the exam No tone drill, no speaking, no HSK format Only if you build it yourself, and almost nobody does Tone drill, shadowing, HSKK practice and full mock papers in the official format
What is in it

Six ways in, one memory.

HSK 3.0 examines five skills, and it splits the characters you read from the smaller set you write. An app that only shows you flashcards is preparing you for a different exam.

Recognition

Every character arrives finished: story, picture, components, tones, audio, examples and the neighbours it is confused with. You never build a flashcard, and FSRS returns it exactly when you are about to forget it.

Listening

A format of its own, not a subtitle on a reading card. The exam gyms run the parts of the real paper in order — pictures, matching, statements, dialogues — with the mix per level following the actual test.

Writing

The prompt is the meaning and the sound, never the glyph, because the glyph is the answer. New characters are traced once to activate them; after that you write them from nothing.

Tones

Ear first: while there is sound, the character stays hidden until you answer, so the drill tests your hearing rather than your reading. Four tones that change the meaning are not a detail you pick up later.

Speaking

Shadowing — hear a native line, hear it again slowed down, say it back. And HSKK practice for the oral exam, which is mandatory from HSK 3: the three task types, with your answer transcribed and judged.

The exam

Full papers in the official HSK 3.0 format. Timed sections that run in order, no feedback until you hand in, listening played the way the hall plays it, and a report scored like the real thing.

爱 ài to love
红 hóng red
求 qiú to seek
聚 jù to assemble
族 zú race
舍 shě house
官 guān official

Real entries from the HSK 3.0 syllabus, in the tone colours Gushi uses everywhere.

How spaced repetition holds memory Two curves over time. Without review, recall decays steeply and keeps falling. With Gushi, each review returns recall to full and the next one is scheduled further out — after one day, then three, then eight, then twenty-one. 100% 90% a review lands here — just before you would forget without review 1 day 3 days 8 days 21 days with FSRS
The same 10% of memory lost each time — over a longer and longer stretch. That gap is the work you do not have to do.
And around it

The parts that make the hours add up.

Chunk drill

A sentence with a hole and the right chunk to drop into it. The carrier sentence sits at your level while the chunk runs far above it — the only way a beginner meets a word like 供应链 inside a sentence they can actually read.

Reading you can hear

Articles play sentence by sentence, and any sentence replays on tap. Reading aloud with nothing to check against is guessing at the tones.

Lessons, not just levels

HSK 3 alone is 284 characters and 491 words. Lessons are the rung between starting a level and finishing it, so there is always a next thing that ends.

Pricing

Free for 14 days. Then 9,99 € a month.

One subscription through the App Store — every level, every skill. No per-deck purchases and no ads.

Everything is free for 14 days. The whole app — graded reading, listening, mock exams, all nine levels. The trial runs through your Apple Account, and nothing is charged if you cancel before it ends.
Monthly 9,99 € / month Cancel any time
  • Every level and every skill
  • Reading, listening, writing
  • HSK 3.0 mock exams, every level
Best value Yearly 99,99 € / year Two months on us
  • Everything in monthly
  • One payment a year, then forget it
  • Cancel before renewal, any time

Billed by Apple through the App Store; EU prices include VAT. Manage or cancel in your Apple Account settings.

Answers

Frequently asked.

Do I need to know any Chinese to start?
No. Gushi starts at the very first character and teaches pinyin, tones and characters in order. If you already know some Chinese, you claim those levels during setup and their characters are seeded as known, so they go straight into review instead of being re-taught.
How is this different from Anki?
Anki is an empty box. The scheduling is excellent and the deck is your problem — which is why most people quit at deck-building rather than at Chinese. Gushi ships the deck: every character already has its components, a story, a picture, colour-coded tones, recorded audio, example sentences and its confusable neighbours, scheduled by the same class of algorithm. You never build a flashcard.
Does it work offline?
Yes. Gushi is local-first: every review and every point of progress is written on the device first and synced afterwards. A session on a plane or an underground train works normally and uploads when you reconnect.
What about HSK 3.0?
Gushi is built on the syllabus published in November 2025: all 3,088 reading characters, 10,896 words and 429 grammar points across the nine levels, plus mock exams in the official format. When the new standard actually replaces the old one in the test centres is a separate question, and we keep an honest account of it on the HSK 3.0 page.

the HSK 3.0 page →

Get the app

Be honest about where you start. Show up. The stories carry the rest.

14 days free, then a few minutes a day — from your first character to the advanced band.

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