Zi Yue English
Read English books with notes
Free · Designed for iPad. Not verified for macOS.
You have memorised thirty thousand words and still stall on page one of a real English novel.
Zi Yue English does not count the words you have studied: it tells you how much of a real English
book you can read right now, and then opens it at the page you can already read.
NOTE: THE APP'S INTERFACE IS IN SIMPLIFIED CHINESE. It is built for Chinese speakers reading
English books, so the report, the notes and the stories are Chinese, and the only English is the
book itself and the words it teaches. This description is in English so you can tell what you are
buying; if you do not read Chinese, it is not for you.
Measure first, then read
50 words, about 3 minutes, once. One word per screen, answer known or unknown. Six do not exist;
claim those and the score is corrected (Meara & Buxton, 1987). Next launch returns to your report,
dated.
The report: one number, one interval, one walkable distance
- How much you can read, computed word by word against the real vocabulary of 15 English novels
- A confidence interval, so the number is not dressed up as precision it does not have
- How far to go: how many words stand between you and 95%, and between you and 98% (Hu & Nation
2000; Nation 2006), with the most cost-effective words listed in order
The main line: Chinese prose with English words inside
A story written in Chinese, with exactly the words your report prescribed swapped into English.
- The Chinese carries the sentence; the one English word is the only place you have to think
- You guess from context; tapping confirms rather than looks up
- Which words are swapped in is decided by your report, never by the author
- Three levels cut from your own ranking; every swapped word appears at least three times
- Open a word and it joins the review list - no quiz, and it comes back on its own
The other direction: read the English original
The report names the book you can read best; the button under it opens that book at chapter one.
- The text is the original English, unchanged; the Chinese notes under each paragraph gloss the
words in it you do not know yet, in order, so nothing is tapped while reading
- How much is glossed follows your own measurement: three positions at the top, the middle one
being your measured level
- Swipe to turn a page: the pages run on through the whole novel, past chapter ends, and the
page you stopped on is remembered
One book, five ways to read it
Nine of the fifteen works also ship as a full Chinese translation, with the words you do not know
yet swapped back into English, and as a condensation whose length is about one tenth of the book's
English word count (measured across the nine: 1/8 to 1/11). One book therefore sits on the shelf at
three lengths, and six original stories in Chinese carry the same prescribed words.
Translations and condensations are model-generated, not human translation; the English original is
never edited.
Why not "tap a word to look it up"
Because you have already done that, and it is why you stopped at page 3. Looking a word up
interrupts reading, and reading is the only thing that makes vocabulary stay.
Read aloud, and offline
The app picks a sentence from the top words in your report and you read it out; recognition runs on
this device, the recording is never written to disk or uploaded. No network, no account, no data
collected, no in-app purchases; six screens ask for no permission, and refusing the microphone
costs them nothing.
Nine screens. No streaks, no leaderboards, no notification prompts.
Corpus
15 works first published 1813-1925, all public domain in China, the UK and the US at once: Pride and
Prejudice, Frankenstein, Dracula, Moby-Dick, Walden and ten more. Chinese glosses and IPA from
ECDICT (MIT licence). Names of people and places are not counted as words to learn. The corpus is
classic literature, not contemporary speech: the number measures reading books like these, not an
exam score.
Ratings & Reviews
Readers who picked CET6 found four of the six stories opening as a purely Chinese page. Each story now carries one English word above your boundary, used three times in its own sentences. TOEFL and GRE are still empty, and the page says why rather than showing a blank sheet.
The developer, 安清 邵, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- 安清 邵
- Size
- 20.1 MB
- Category
- Education
- Compatibility
Requires iOS 17.0 or later.
- iPhone
Requires iOS 17.0 or later. - iPad
Requires iPadOS 17.0 or later. - Mac
Requires macOS 14.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later. - Apple Vision
Requires visionOS 1.0 or later.
- iPhone
- Languages
- Simplified Chinese
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- Copyright
- © 2026 安清 邵
