YiCi

YiCi puts vocabulary where you already look: English, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, German and French, each with a card designed for that language.

Add a widget to your iPhone Home Screen, Lock Screen or StandBy display. Each card shows one word. On interactive cards, tap the speaker button to hear the word without opening the app, or mark it as known to move on. Each widget can show its own language, so an English card and a Japanese card can sit side by side.

Every language has its own card

English: British and American IPA, highlighted examples, word forms and collocations.

Japanese: furigana, pitch-accent lines, highlighted conjugated forms, and notes on selected Chinese-Japanese false friends.

Chinese: tone-colored pinyin with tone changes, measure words and character components; simplified or traditional. Made for learners of Chinese, with English glosses.

Korean: real pronunciation in brackets, hanja, and sound changes in examples.

German: nouns colored by gender and always shown with their article, IPA, plurals and principal parts; both halves of separable verbs highlighted.

French: gender and feminine forms, IPA, liaison arcs in examples and dimmed silent letters.

Review at your pace

Each language keeps its own books and daily deck. Choose 1, 3, 5 or 10 new words a day and rotate cards during your chosen hours. A 7-step memory ladder schedules reviews after 1, 2, 4, 7, 15, 30 and 60 days. Exposure and active confirmation advance the ladder; unfamiliar words return for practice. This is a review schedule, not a guarantee of learning results.

A library that works offline

English has 9 books (middle school, high school, CET-4, CET-6, postgraduate exams, IELTS, TOEFL, GRE, Core 3000) with 15,271 words. Japanese follows JLPT N5–N1, Chinese HSK 1–6, Korean TOPIK, and German and French CEFR A1–B2, plus some theme books. Level labels are learning aids, not official exam certification.

Continue on Mac and Apple Watch

On Mac, keep a word in the menu bar or use desktop widgets. Apple Watch can show vocabulary in local notifications after you enable reminders, and lets you browse today's cards. Optional iCloud sync shares progress, settings and daily decks through your private CloudKit database. The developer cannot access it. Sync requires iCloud and an internet connection; offline study does not.

Quiet by design

No sign-up, advertising, tracking or in-app purchases. Buy once, every language included, on iPhone, Apple Watch and Mac with the same Apple account. The interface is available in English and Simplified Chinese. Speech uses Apple's on-device voices; some voices need to be downloaded in system settings first. Widget refreshes and Watch reminders depend on system scheduling and your settings.

Data credits

English: ECDICT (MIT), CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (BSD-style).

Japanese: JMdict / EDRDG, JmdictFurigana, kanjium (CC BY-SA 4.0), Waller JLPT list (CC BY).

Chinese: CC-CEDICT (CC BY-SA 4.0), complete-hsk-vocabulary (MIT), Make Me a Hanzi (LGPL-3.0).

Korean: Wiktionary / Kaikki (CC BY-SA 4.0), NIKL Korean learning vocabulary (KOGL Type 1).

German and French: Wiktionary / Kaikki, wordfreq, Lexique 3.83 (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Some examples: Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR); word details keep sentence IDs and source links. Some definitions and examples are edited or authored content. Full notices are under Data Sources and Licenses in the app.

Support: gxlself@gmail.com