I built Mò in one week on vacation to help me achieve conversational Chinese fluency through vocab drills. The problem: Duolingo is engaging but not effective. Anki is effective but designed in the stone age. So I built this to be quietly opinionated: fully offline, peaceful design aesthetic, all 2,199 words of HSK 1, 2, and 3, native audio, characters decoded, and the latest in spaced-repetition science. Free. No login even.
Hi Product Hunt,
I'm Nate, the maker. I built Mò in one week while on vacation, using AI as a coding partner. The goal was simple: get myself conversational in Chinese through daily vocab drills, on my MRT commute in Singapore.
I'd tried the obvious options. Duolingo is engaging but not effective: I'd spend 20 minutes a day and not retain anything. Anki is effective but designed in the stone age: between the ugly interface and paradox of choice between hundreds of flashcard sets, it's never stuck for me. I wanted something quietly opinionated that did one thing well.
Mò is what I came up with. A few specific decisions that scratched real itches:
1. All 2,199 words of HSK 1, 2, and 3 live inside the binary. 60 MB. No server, no account, no telemetry. The app works in airplane mode end to end, essential for my commute.
2. Two native audio recordings per word (the word itself plus a curated example sentence), all bundled. About 7 KB each at 32 kbps speech-optimised MP3.
3. An FSRS v6 spaced-repetition schedule that learns your own forgetting curve. The same algorithm Anki now uses, with per-user weight fitting and sane defaults so you don't have to touch anything.
4. A geofenced 'arrive at your station' reminder. I pinned my MRT stop; when I get there, the reminder fires and I do the day's session on the ride home. Uses iOS low-power region monitoring, not background GPS.
5. Genuinely free. No login. No in-app purchases. The app doesn't link StoreKit at all.
I built this because building it was fun, it gave me exactly what I wanted, and now I actually study on the MRT. Published because if you want the same thing, you can have it.
Would love feedback, especially from anyone frustrated by the streak-and-paywall model in language apps.
Group Card Creator