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Who Are We
KYApplications is a small project aimed at developing mobile phone applications for Apple's operating system (iOS). Currently, we have made one app, KYTones (Know Your Tones) whose purpose is to help build your knowledge of pinyin and Mandarin Chinese listening skills through the recognition of individual syllables
KYTones
The KYTones App allows you to test yourself by listening to one syllable at a time and writing the corresponding pinyin. The test is highly configurable, you can jump straight in and test yourself on everything or focus on hearing the difference between lá and lǎ. Challenges help you keep track of your progress and verbose documentation explains what pinyin is, as well as how the app was built
Why Learn Pinyin?
Pinyin is more than just a useful way to check if you heard a Chinese syllable correctly. It is ubiquitous, and is used to both type Chinese characters on digital devices and search for them in the dictionary. In fact, some learners only ever learn pinyin without learning Chinese characters, though we would strongly discourage this practice