About this game

Who it is for

This is for people who cannot find the words right away when someone speaks to them in Chinese on the street, and who want to try replying without pressure.
When you choose a reply, you see what the other person says next and a one-line reason for how your reply sounds. If you ask again, they say it again slowly in easier words.
This is new. There are no user comments or numbers yet that show it helps.

It does not give you practice in making your own Chinese sentences or in speaking aloud. You only choose replies with buttons. It is not meant for tone-listening practice either.
It is not meant for exam preparation or business Chinese. There are only six scenes. It uses simplified characters only, not traditional ones.

You are out in town, and someone suddenly speaks to you in Chinese. Choose your reply with the buttons. Who speaks to you, and where, is picked at random when you open this page. After a conversation ends, you can choose where to go next (the scene). The person is picked at random each time.
The other person's lines and the replies you choose appear as text (simplified characters and pinyin) and audio. Audio plays when you open the page, when you press a button, and when the next scene starts (some browsers do not play it on opening). You can turn it off with the "Sound" button at the top. You can play with text only if there is no sound.
No sign-up. Free.

The lines, the pinyin, the notes and the English translations were written by AI. They have not been checked by a native Chinese speaker. The notes and the explanations of the names were compared with a dictionary by AI, but they have not been checked by a native Chinese speaker or a specialist.
The labels "Natural", "Gets across" and "Off track" and the one-line reasons are also written by AI as a rough guide. They are not guaranteed to be correct.
The pinyin has tone marks. "一" and "不" are written with the tones they take in speech (after tone change). Neutral-tone syllables have no mark. No person has checked that the pinyin matches the audio.
The people, their names and personalities, the scenes, directions, shop layouts and dishes are made up for practice. They are not real people, and they do not match real places.
The voices are synthesized. They are not the voices of real people. No person has listened to check that the readings are correct.
The four partners' voices and the voice for your replies are all based on one synthesized voice, because the speech service we use has only one Mandarin voice. The reply voice is made in a different way and slightly lower.

No cookies are used. Nothing is stored in your browser. The server does not create a record for you as a person (no ID, name or email address).
The server keeps daily totals of how many conversations started, how many times someone asked again, and how many reached the end, counted by screen language, scene and partner. They cannot be linked to any person. In addition, ordinary access logs (date and time, IP address, browser information and the URL of the page) are kept, as with our other services. In this game, the partner, the scene, the sequence of replies you chose, whether pinyin is hidden, whether you hid the notes, the partner, scene and replies of the conversation just before, and whether you opened the review are part of the URL, so they also appear in those logs.