ChronoSpeak drops you into Tang Chang'an, Song Bianjing and Ming Suzhou — and gives you a character who answers in Chinese, with Pinyin and a translation one tap away. Haggle for saffron. Drink with Li Bai. Argue your way onto a treasure ship.
Su Hexiang
Spice merchant of the West Market · Tang Chang'an
客官，来看看！这是刚从西域运来的香料。
Kèguān, lái kàn kan! Zhè shì gāng cóng Xīyù yùn lái de xiāngliào.
Honoured customer, come and look! This spice has just arrived from the Western Regions.
Each module is a complete historical world with its own cast, its own accent palette and its own language profile. Ancient China is live; three more are in the workshop.
Imperial China · 618–1644 CE
A thousand years of imperial China, from the cosmopolitan markets of Tang Chang'an to the scholar gardens of Ming Suzhou. You do not read about these people — you talk to them, in their language, and they answer.
Feudal Japan · 1185–1868 CE
Indigo, cedar and the Tōkaidō road. Romaji and JLPT support already designed in.
Imperial Rome · 27 BCE–476 CE
Latin needs no romanisation — the phonetic helper switches to vowel quantity marks automatically.
Renaissance Europe · 1400–1600 CE
CEFR-aligned levels, stress-mark helpers, and an Italian profile that needed no new UI code.
1 of 4 modules are live. Subscribing to Pro unlocks every module as it ships.
Free conversation teaches you to survive. Authored dialogue teaches you to speak well. ChronoSpeak gives you both, and tells you which one you are in.
Every persona has a century, a trade, a register and a set of things they refuse to talk about. Su Hexiang will not discuss events after 907 CE, because for her they have not happened.
Pinyin is not hard-coded anywhere. The label, the script and the proficiency scale come from the language profile — so Japanese renders Romaji and Latin renders vowel quantity marks, with no new code.
Vocabulary, culture notes and grammar explanations attach to the line that needs them. The 太…了 frame arrives the moment you say 太贵了, not three chapters earlier.
Every character line is speakable. Browser voices work today at no cost; ElevenLabs and OpenAI voices plug in behind the same interface when you want the good ones.
Voice input with speech recognition, so you practise the tones with your mouth rather than your eyes — with the transcript shown before anything is sent.
Idioms, historical figures, places and artefacts are collectibles with rarity and XP. 和气生财 is not a flashcard. It is something you took off a merchant in the West Market.
Daily counters roll over on your local calendar day, not UTC — so a 11pm session in Seoul counts for today, which is when it actually happened.
Start free in the West Market. Everything else opens with Pro — except the Scholar's Garden, which has no script at all, and is the whole point of Max.
西市Xī Shì
Haggle for saffron with a merchant who has heard every language on the Silk Road.
Requires Pro
Li Bai is waiting
曲江宴Qū Jiāng Yàn
Requires Pro
Lu Yu is waiting
茶馆Chá Guǎn
Requires Pro
Zhao Qiaoyun is waiting
元宵灯会Yuán Xiāo Dēng Huì
Requires Pro
Bi Sheng is waiting
书坊Shū Fāng
Idioms, figures, places and artefacts you collect by playing. Not flashcards — 和气生财 is something you took off a merchant in the West Market, and you will not forget where it came from.
Zheng He's first voyage carried 317 vessels and roughly 27,800 people. The largest treasure ships were reported at over 400 feet — several times the length of anything afloat in Europe at the time.
To offer something exquisite to someone incapable of appreciating it. The Tang court used it about poetry recited to soldiers; Li Bai uses it about courtiers.
The shopkeeper's creed. A seller who stays pleasant makes more money than one who wins the argument — which is why Su Hexiang teases you about your tones instead of correcting them coldly.
The universal answer to 太贵了. Its rhetorical power is that it reframes your complaint: you are not being overcharged, you are being offered exactly what you are paying for.
Discuss restraint and negative space with Wen Zhengming.
Open the Language Helper while in the West Market.
17 entries in Ancient China, each with a rarity and an XP award.
No card to begin. One scene, ten turns a day, and the whole Memory Log — enough to know whether this works for you.
Step into one scene
$0forever
One complete historical scene, in full. Enough to know whether talking your way through Tang China is the thing you have been looking for.
10 dialogue turns per day
Every dynasty, every script
$9.99per month
All seven scenes across the Tang, Song and Ming, each with an authored dialogue path that teaches the grammar at the exact moment you need it.
150 dialogue turns per day
Unscripted, uncorrected, unstoppable
$19.99per month
Everything in Pro, plus the scenes with no script at all — an open conversation with a Ming master, corrected in real time as you write.
Unlimited dialogue turns
The things people ask about ChronoSpeak before their first scene.
Still unsure? The free scene needs no account — go and see.
