Real Stories from a Real Family
The best reading material isn't in a textbook — it's what actually happened to you today. These are real stories from our family's phone, exactly as the app holds them: written in English, translated with ✨, read with pinyin and audio, and reviewed as flashcards. This is how the app is meant to be used.
Each story below is shown as it lives in the app: the Chinese lines with their English underneath, and the photo that makes it yours. In the app, every word is tappable — and one tap in the first story started a small vocabulary investigation. Watch for 车库 below.
My Nissan Story
A storm, a beloved old Cefiro, and a sentence that taught us something about dictionaries:
今天，我醒来以后，
Today, after I woke up,
我抬头看我的车。
I looked up at my car.
我的车在车库里。 — the app underlines 车库 as ONE word, gloss garage
My car was in the garage.
我看到一棵树的树干
I saw the trunk of a tree
掉在我的车上。
had fallen onto my car.
When we tapped 车库 in this story, it showed its meaning — garage — but no HSK level, no green color. Why? Many Chinese-learning websites list 车库 as "HSK 3.0 Level 5", so you'd expect it to count as curriculum vocabulary.
We checked — properly. The official standard, 《国际中文教育中文水平等级标准》 (GF0025-2021), does not include 车库 at any level. Four independent machine transcriptions of the official list agree — including one OCR'd directly from the Ministry of Education PDF:
- ivankra/hsk30 — official PDF, cross-validated (11,092 terms)
- andycburke/HSK-3.0-Word-List — OCR of the official MoE PDF
So why do so many tutorials include it? Hand-maintained school lists drift — 车库 feels like it belongs (its relatives 停车场 and 车辆 are official), someone added it, and other sites copied it. A reminder for learners (and parents): when a word list matters, check what it's transcribed from.
And the lesson for using the app: 车库 still works perfectly — meaning, pinyin, audio, and it stays one word when you read 我的车在车库里. It just honestly reports that it isn't on the official curriculum list. Real words first; labels second.
Life with Xiaomi
Xiaomi 变成妈妈。
Xiaomi became a mom.
Xiaomi 有四只可爱的小猫。
Xiaomi has four cute kittens.
三个是白的。
Three are white.
一个是黑的。
And one is black.
它们很小，很爱玩。
They are tiny and playful,
而且很可爱
and very cute.
我喜欢看它们长大。
I love watching them grow.
My Diary
A category with no cover photo — just words from the day. The story inside: "At McDonald's" — the everyday errand that turns out to be a lesson in measure words (一杯咖啡…).
我们去了麦当劳。
We went to McDonald's.
我们买了一杯咖啡，
We bought one cup of coffee,
冰淇淋和汉堡包。
ice cream and a hamburger.
Your version of this page is waiting in your own day. What happened today that made you laugh, or swear, or take a photo? That's your next story. See Stories for the how, and Getting Started for the five-minute setup.