HEYGOW

What this site is for

HEYGOW exists so that anyone with nothing but a phone can hear a foreign language spoken, over and over, until it stays. That is the whole idea. There is no course to enrol in, no streak to keep and no account to make: you open a page, press play, and let a phrase repeat as many times as you need.

It is built for the gaps in a day - a train, a queue, ten minutes before sleep - which is why every page works on a small screen with one thumb, and why the audio is cached so it keeps playing when the signal does not.

What is in it

• 3,470 Chinese phrases across 357 subcategories, from the four tones up to internet slang
• A pre-recorded audio file for every phrase, playable on a loop at four speeds
• Every phrase translated into six languages, with the display language switchable at any time
• A hand-written introduction on each subcategory page, in all six languages - 2,100 paragraphs, none of them boilerplate

How the material is made

The phrases are written by hand, not scraped. Before anything is published it goes through three automatic checks: the pinyin is verified against a second implementation, the phrase is compared against the whole site so nothing appears twice, and each translation is checked for the writing system it should be in.

The audio is generated with neural text-to-speech rather than recorded by a person. That is an honest limitation and worth stating plainly: it is clear, consistent and correct on tones, but it is not a native speaker in a room. Every file is also measured after generation, so a clip that came out truncated or silent is caught rather than shipped.

Who runs it

HEYGOW is run by one person, independently. It is not a company and has no staff, no investors and no institutional backing.

The site is funded by advertising, which is what keeps it free to use and free of sign-ups. Nothing on the site is a paid placement, and no advertiser has any say in what appears here.

Corrections

A language site that gets something wrong teaches the mistake. If you find an error - a wrong tone, an unnatural phrase, a translation that misses - please say so. Corrections are the most useful thing anyone can send.