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Daily Seal: Chinese Widget

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Daily Seal: Chinese Widget

iOSComing soon

One Chinese word at a time, on your Lock Screen

Daily Seal puts one Chinese word on your Lock Screen and Home Screen: the characters, the pinyin and the meaning in your own language. The word changes on the schedule you pick, so every time you check the time you see it again, until you know it without reading the pinyin.

It is not released. It is getting ready for App Review, and there is no App Store listing and no release date yet.

An iPhone Lock Screen at 9:41 with two Daily Seal widgets: a rectangle showing 上学, shàngxué, to go to school, and a circle showing 上学 with its pinyin
The word under the clock.
The Word screen: 那边 in large characters, nàbian above it, an HSK 1 seal, the meaning over there; yonder, and the example sentence 银行在那边 with the word in red
Each word with an example, read aloud.
The Library screen: Quick review, the word being learned, and a list headed Up next on the widget with words and the time each one will show
What you have seen, and what comes next.

Widgets

  • Lock Screen: the word with its pinyin and meaning beside it, the characters alone in a circle with the pinyin underneath, or one line above the clock.
  • Home Screen in three sizes, with the HSK level on a red seal. The medium and large sizes add an example sentence with the word marked in red, and show how the word is built: 干什么 is 干, to do, and 什么, what.
  • One set of options for every widget: pinyin, meaning and example sentence, each on or off, and a new word every 30 minutes, every hour, every two hours or once a day.

Words at your level

The vocabulary is HSK 3.0, from level 1 to levels 7–9 (11,092 words), one level or several at once. A short placement check asks how much you know and lets you tap the words you recognise, so the widget starts where new words begin. Characters are Simplified or Traditional.

Meanings and example sentences come in English, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Indonesian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and German. Vietnamese learners also see each word’s Sino-Vietnamese reading, which makes many words easy to remember.

Learning that sticks

  • Tap I know it and the word does not come back.
  • Words you have seen return on a widening schedule, mixed in with new ones.
  • Quick review in the app: match words with their meanings, or pick the right meaning.
  • The Library keeps what the widget has shown, what you are learning, saved and known, and the next words coming up with their times.
  • Up to three reminders a day, each one a word, with quiet hours at night, or none at all.
  • A streak and a grid of the days you studied, and any word or the streak shared as a picture.

What it does not do

No account, no server, no analytics, no ads and no third-party code. Every word is inside the app, so it works offline, and your progress and settings stay on your iPhone. There are no lessons, speaking practice, pronunciation scoring or handwriting: it is for learning to recognise words.

Honest limits

  • The Lock Screen is one colour. iOS tints Lock Screen widgets itself, so the red seal shows only on the Home Screen and in the app.
  • iOS decides when a widget redraws, so a new word can take a moment to appear.
  • Words are read by your iPhone’s own voices. How they sound depends on the Chinese voices installed on the phone.
  • Pinyin and English meanings come from CC-CEDICT; the other languages and the example sentences were written with AI from those meanings.
  • iPhone only, iOS 18 or later.