OracleQuest: Learn Chinese
Oracle bone script & hanzi
$4.99 · Designed for iPad. Not verified for macOS.
How did people write “sun”, “moon” and “mountain” 3,000 years ago? Trace, rebuild and decode 500 oracle-bone characters and see where Chinese writing began.
OracleQuest teaches 500 Chinese characters through their oldest surviving forms: the oracle-bone script carved on turtle shells and ox bones in the Shang dynasty, more than 3,000 years ago.
• Meet each character as a picture first: the sun, a horse, a hand, a boat.
• Trace it with your finger, rebuild it from bone fragments, match it to its modern form.
• Watch it change from oracle bone to bronze, seal and modern script.
• Read a whole divination text laid out part by part, with the characters you have learned.
• 31 chapters and 148 lessons of 3–7 minutes, with spaced review of what you find hard.
• Point the camera at a carved or printed character, or pick a photo, and the app names it — entirely on your device.
• Finish today's dig and unearth a fragment of one of 21 Shang artifacts.
• Visit the museum: a timeline of the Shang reigns, and the artifacts you have restored.
Every drawing follows one specific inscription catalogued in Academia Sinica's 小學堂 oracle-bone database, with its 《甲骨文合集》 number, and every explanation says how sure scholars are: widely accepted, probable, or still debated. Where specialists disagree the app names them — Luo Zhenyu, Wang Guowei, Guo Moruo, Yu Xingwu, Qiu Xigui — and says where each attribution was verified.
Nothing is invented to make a better story. The inscriptions you read are written in the fixed Shang divination formula and say so plainly; they do not reproduce any one excavated bone.
Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and English. No account, no ads, no tracking, works fully offline.
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The developer, Yinhuan Yuan, 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.
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Information
- Seller
- Yinhuan Yuan
- Size
- 30 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.
- iPhone
- Languages
English and 2 more
- English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- Copyright
- © 2026 Yinhuan Yuan
