maayot | Read Chinese & Learn

I am obsessed with this app. Premium is truly worth it. Daily stories with the right amount of challenge and personal investment has taken my reading to the next level. The stories are engaging and have the right mix of idiomatic phrases and general vocab. I now look forward to reading Mandarin every day! The three reading levels mean you can start off in any way and get the appropriate challenge - for example the beginner stories are not just ‘easier’, they are shorter. They also mix in 1-2 stories of the upper level each week, so you don’t plateau and can gain more confidence. The spaced repetition of new characters in different contexts (on different story days) also helps with learning new characters faster. You also save a lot of time not having to looking up unfamiliar characters - the app has an intuitive quick tap function to reveal both pin yin and meaning. Because of all this, it is light years ahead of services like Duolingo. With other language apps I always felt like I was just playing a game, barely progressing. Not having enough to sink my teeth into and feel emotional investment. Combine this app with a flashcard app to take notes as you wish, and you are set. The only thing I wish is that Maayot could become a language empire and do this same format, for other languages. :)

I know that language textbooks start with inviting, massive text at the beginning levels and then get increasingly smaller as learners progress, but the text on this app is nearly illegibly small. I don’t even read text this small in my native language because it hurts my eyes to try. It has nothing to do with my Chinese reading ability. The fact that I can’t adjust the text size or copy it into Pleco (where I can adjust the text size and make vocab lists for free) makes this app nearly useless to me. For ten bucks a month, i would expect there to be a vocabulary list feature and text size adjustment ability. The audio also cuts out if you leave the app or hit the lock button on the phone. This means that if you’re working with a text the way most research indicates you should, which would be to only listen to it a few times before listening and following along with the words, you have to have your phone unlocked while listening, which makes doing anything else while listening really difficult.It’s a good idea in theory to only have one text available per day. I was looking forward to trying it out and not facing decision fatigue. But apps like Chairman’s Bao are cheaper and have far more features, even if it’s easy to get overwhelmed or bounce around with a seemingly limitless supply of choices of texts. The premium membership idea just freaks me out. Who would want to record their voice to send to China for “feedback”? Do you know what China uses that kind of information for? If you’re learning Chinese, you should be aware of the dystopian crazy stuff that the CCP is doing with tech. You should assume your voice recording is being used for nefarious purposes. But maayot wants you to pay them fifty bucks a month for that?

Maayot has one main goal: to offer new readings to its many students. I have only used the beginning level, so I know the readings are simple for a reason. So far after a few weeks, the readings are varied and offer gradual exposure to new vocabulary and some review of previous vocabulary. There is a built in dictionary function, but it is very simple, so additional help might be needed to understand some words/phrases in context. There is also a quiz with each reading that requires a close reading of the text. I wish there could be more than one question, but when a new text is offered every day, I understand why it is short. The final section is a written response to a prompt based on the reading. It’s fun to see how other users have responded.