Readly

Readly approaches Chinese learning from the direction most learners actually live in: the world around them. Instead of starting with a textbook list, you scan the text in front of you — a restaurant menu, a metro sign, a page from a novel — and Readly handles the OCR, character extraction and lookup in one motion. That scanned passage immediately becomes a study object with pinyin, tone marks, translation and audio, so difficult characters turn into something you can read, say and remember.

The second half of the workflow is retention. Words you collect during scanning can be saved into flashcards and reviewed on a spaced-repetition schedule, which is the same principle behind popular tools like Anki. By combining an on-the-go scanner with a review loop, Readly aims to close the gap between noticing a new word and actually learning it. Categories on its listing span OCR, translation, language learning, flashcard making, text-to-speech and Q&A, which reflects that combined scan-and-study design.

Because the site occasionally sits behind a bot-verification layer, some public documentation is thin, and specific limits are best confirmed inside the app itself. Broadly, Readly offers a free entry point alongside paid plans that raise scanning limits and unlock premium speech and review features.