zh.tou.gg: Chinese homework, in the order of the slides

zh.tou.gg is the smaller sibling of Zitou. Zitou is a full course. zh.tou.gg does one job: it takes what a Chinese teacher sends after a lesson and turns it into practice you can do in order.

I started learning Chinese on 19 September 2026. The Worker behind zh.tou.gg went up two days later, on 21 September.

The job

After a lesson, a student usually has three things: photos of the slides, the homework text, and the textbook audio. They live in a chat, out of order, and nothing tells you what to do first.

In zh.tou.gg you add those three things, and the app reads them. Every slide becomes a numbered list in the same order as on the slide, the homework text becomes a plan, and each audio file is attached to its dialogue. You compare the result with the original photo and press Save. Where something is uncertain, for example a tone mark that was hard to read, the app marks it instead of guessing.

The teacher does not need to change anything. They send slides and homework as usual; the app turns them into ordered practice.

What you practise

• Lists in slide order. Numbers in a picture are easy to remember in sequence, so the app keeps them as 01, 02, 03. Cover one column and recall from top to bottom.
• Stroke order. First you watch the strokes, then you trace over grey, then you write from memory with your finger. A wrong stroke is shown immediately. 9,574 characters have stroke order data.
• Tones and pinyin. The tone test plays a syllable and you choose its tone. You can type pinyin with numbers, ni3 becomes nǐ, or write it by hand.
• Search. Find any word by character, pinyin (tones optional) or translation, then write it in stroke order straight away, including characters that were not in the lesson.
• Dialogues like a podcast. The textbook audio plays sentence by sentence, the current sentence lights up, and tapping a sentence plays only that one. There is a pause for slowing down and repeating.
• Homework as a plan. The teacher's text is shown word for word, and next to each task it says what to do: write it in a notebook, memorise it, write it in the app, or make sentences.

Made for a group

One student adds the lesson and shares it by link. Classmates open it and practise with the same lists without creating an account. When the work is done, one button sends a report to the teacher in Telegram: which tasks are finished, how many characters were written from memory in stroke order, and which words were hard.

Small, free and private

It is free and has no ads. Lessons and results are kept on your own device. Visits are counted anonymously with GoatCounter, without cookies, and nothing about you is recorded. It works on a phone and a computer, and after the first visit it works without internet; on a phone you can add it to the home screen.

Two features are still limited to my own account for now: reading photos automatically, and syncing across several devices. The interface is in Uzbek, English, Russian and Chinese, and the lesson content always stays exactly as the teacher wrote it.

Open zh.tou.gg. If you are past HSK 1 or want a full course, Zitou is the bigger app.