A Mandarin lab for adult learners and teachers: listening clips written from your own word list, a conversation partner, tone and dictation drills, handwriting, and your own texts.
Free accounts with daily limits are open now (100 places to start, 18 or over).
The 100 free places are taken for now — they'll reopen when I raise the cap, and the founder offer applies to accounts made, and to anyone on the waitlist, by 31 December 2026. The free tone lab at tinglilab.org is always open.
No account needed to look around: Try it on the sign-in screen.
The practice tabs, named in Chinese first, as they are in the lab.
New clip writes a short dialogue or story around ten words from your bank, at the length and difficulty you set, and reads it aloud in a natural voice. Listen first; then reveal the characters, the readings (pinyin, zhuyin or both) and the English in steps, tap any word to replay from it, or hear the whole clip again more slowly.
Words you don't know yet are marked, logged as new, and ready to copy into your flashcard app. Prepare 5 makes clips in advance, to play later or offline.
Hear a syllable or a two-syllable word and tap its tones; play any syllable in each of its four tones in the same voice; take the pair quiz, with the tone changes real speech makes.
In repeat-back you say it back, and the lab draws your pitch over the voice's, with a verdict for single syllables. Every syllable it drills is a stored clip in four voices, so tone practice costs nothing and works offline once a voice is prepared.
A line from one of your clips, or a word from your bank, plays; you type what you hear in pinyin or in 注音 zhuyin, and each syllable is marked for sound and tone.
On the HSK 1–3 words it plays stored clips, with Mainland or Taiwan readings, and it doesn't count against a free account's daily limits.
Learn to write the characters you've been hearing: watch the strokes, trace them, then write the character from memory, prompted by its sound, its pinyin or its meaning.
Every stroke is checked as you draw it, on your device, for shape, direction and order. What needed help comes back the next day, until you write it cleanly from memory.
A spoken conversation with an AI partner playing a role (a friend, a shop assistant, a taxi driver, a stranger on the bus) on an everyday topic, at your level: HSK 1, HSK 1–2, HSK 1–3 or no limit.
Replies come listen-first; tap to talk, or go hands-free. The partner never corrects you mid-conversation, and a debrief afterwards gives you the words you were looking for and two of your lines said even better.
Paste any Chinese text (a reader page, a song, a chapter) and it becomes passages with readings, a translation and questions, read aloud by your voices and played like any clip.
What you've heard and practised, with every round's score and replayable clips, and the words you've met: copy the new ones out, one per line, for a flashcard or writing app.
The drills cover the HSK 1–3 words; Listen and Talk work from your own word list at the level you set. It is not a course and not a flashcard app: use it alongside whatever you use for characters and vocabulary.
Classes with codes, students' logins on printable cards, and each student's progress, with under-18s only through a teacher and a parent's consent. Classes and students.
Built by Ranjan in Canberra for my own learning, which began in September 2026. It began with listening, and with tones, where a self-taught learner gets little honest feedback; a few native-speaker friends tested it, and it is still one person's project. About.
TingliLab.org is the free tone lab: tone dictation, four tones, repeat-back with a tone judge, HSK 1–3 dictation and handwriting, with no account and no limits.