Introducing Yingo: see your tones, fix your tones

Today we’re shipping Yingo v0.1 — a trainer for the part of Mandarin that every app skips.

Most learning apps are good at vocabulary, characters, and grammar, and they all handle tones the same way: a diagram in lesson one, four arrows, good luck. But tones aren’t trivia to memorize — they’re a motor skill, like a golf swing or a violin bow. Skills need a feedback loop: try, see what actually happened, adjust, try again. Audio-only practice can’t close that loop, because you can’t hear your own mistakes with the same ear that made them.

Yingo’s whole job is to close the loop.

Tones on a musical staff

Tones are tiny melodies, so we borrowed the tool humanity invented for melodies: the staff. Every syllable in Yingo is drawn as a stroke on five lines — mā a steady high bar, má a climb, mǎ a low dip, mà a plunge. Each tone keeps its own color everywhere in the app, so the shape and the color start doing the remembering for you.

It sounds like a small thing. It isn’t. Once tones live in space instead of in the air, “I can’t hear it” turns into “I can see exactly where I went wrong.”

Your voice, on the same staff

Tap the mic, say the word, and Yingo traces your pitch — the actual F0 curve of your voice — live over the target contour, then scores how well the shapes match. Not the absolute pitch: it’s calibrated to your range, so a bass and a soprano can both score a perfect má by rising, not by hitting someone else’s notes.

Two details we refused to compromise on:

• Everything runs on-device. Pitch detection and scoring happen locally, in real time. Your voice never leaves your phone — there’s no audio upload, no account needed to practice.
• Offline means offline. Courses, drills, and review all work in airplane mode. Practice on the subway; nothing breaks.

Māo-Māo, your coach

Drilling pronunciation alone can feel clinical, so you won’t be alone. Māo-Māo 猫猫, Yingo’s cat coach, sits in on every session — pleased when your contour lands, unbothered when it doesn’t. Tone practice involves saying ma at your phone forty times; it helps when someone’s purring about it.

What’s in v0.1

Four course tracks, in the order your brain needs them:

• Hear — perception first. Minimal-pair identification (is that má or mǎ?) with instant feedback, because you can’t say a difference you can’t hear.
• Say — production with the live contour. One syllable, one trace, one concrete correction.
• Combine — tone pairs in real two-syllable words, where tones actually live: shuǐjiǎo 水饺 vs shuìjiào 睡觉, all the patterns from 1+1 to 4+4.
• Sandhi — the rules that make speech differ from spelling: why 你好 is ní hǎo, what 不 bù and 一 yī do when tones follow them.

Around the courses:

• Tone-pair drills for targeted practice on the combinations that trip you up.
• Daily review with spaced repetition, so the pairs you struggled with come back right before you’d forget them.
• A daily reminder you can set to keep the streak alive on busy days.

What’s next

v0.1 is the foundation, not the finish line. On our list, roughly in order:

• More drill vocabulary, prioritized by frequency, so every rep is a word you’ll actually use.
• Finer scoring feedback — not just how close your contour was, but where it drifted: started too high, rose too late, didn’t stay low.
• Longer course arcs beyond the fundamentals, including neutral-tone patterns and connected speech.

And honestly, the rest of the list belongs to you. If something feels off, confusing, or missing, tell us via the support page — v0.x is exactly the time to shape this thing.

Tones are learnable. There are four of them, they each have a shape, and now you can watch yourself draw them. 加油 — jiāyóu!