The app blocker that teaches you Chinese.
MandoMaxxing shields your distracting apps. To open them, finish a short Mandarin task: a story to read, words to understand, sentences to write. Your scroll time becomes study time.
MandoMaxxing: the apps you already open on reflex become the reason you practise. A bit of Chinese happens every day, whether you felt motivated or not.
MandoMaxxing: every task is built on comprehensible input: Mandarin pitched just at your level, about things you actually care about. You read it aloud, get quizzed in fresh contexts, and use the words in your own sentences.
You don't have to build a new habit. You borrow the strongest one you already have.
Read a fresh story aloud with live word-by-word highlighting. Tap any word for pinyin, meaning, and a native voice.
AI quizzes each of your words in fresh sentences and new contexts, so you learn how it's really used instead of one flashcard meaning.
Write your own sentences with the words you've collected. AI checks them and coaches your phrasing. It's the step from recognition to fluency.
“Story complete. Apps unlocked!”
Pick your HSK level and we'll write every story for it: never too hard, never too easy. Choose your topics and that's what your stories are about. Right level plus content you actually want to read is what makes input comprehensible. It's not a setting; it's the whole reason it works.
Choose the apps that eat your time. MandoMaxxing shields them by default, using Apple's own Screen Time controls.
Pick a task and a window: 1 hour, 2 hours, 4 hours, or the whole day. Bigger windows take more words.
Your apps open for the window you earned. When it ends, the shield returns, ready for tomorrow's words.
Tightening the shield is instant. Loosening it takes 24 hours. That's the point.
It's the idea from language-acquisition research that you learn a language fastest by reading and hearing lots of it at a level you can mostly understand, about things you find genuinely interesting. Too hard and you decode instead of read; too easy and you learn nothing; boring and you quit. MandoMaxxing engineers both halves: every story is matched to your HSK level and written about the topics you picked.
HSK (Hànyǔ Shuǐpíng Kǎoshì, 汉语水平考试) is the standard proficiency scale for Mandarin Chinese, running from HSK 1 (beginner, around 150 of the most common words) to HSK 6 (advanced, around 5,000 words). You don't need to have taken the exam: in MandoMaxxing it's simply the dial that sets how hard your stories and quizzes are, and you can change it any time.
Yes. Pick HSK 1 and your stories are built from the most common words in the language, with pinyin and meaning one tap away on every word. As the words stick, move the dial up.
