Textbooks teach you one and Hong Kong runs on the other.

Start · the problem

The gap nobody warns you about

You can read a Hong Kong newspaper competently and still not understand the evening news, because written Chinese and spoken Cantonese diverge in vocabulary, grammar and register. 認為 on the page becomes 覺得 in the mouth. The textbook teaches the first and the city speaks the second.

So this app puts both on screen at once and makes the mapping between them the thing you study, rather than something you are expected to absorb.

↓ the quality problem, and the fix

Two independent passes, because one is not enough

The hard part of this app is that mechanical written-to-spoken conversion produces confident nonsense. Single-character substitution rules turn 不足 into 唔足 and 其他 into 其佢 — plausible-looking, wrong, and invisible to a learner who cannot yet tell.

So every sentence goes through an LLM rewrite and then a second, independent review pass that specifically hunts for that class of error. The last-resort rule converter was itself rebuilt after a two-reviewer audit, replacing risky single-character swaps with phrase whitelists, and quoted names are never touched.

All of this runs at zero cost on GitHub's free model inference. Adding an ANTHROPIC_API_KEY upgrades both passes to Claude with semantically aligned phrase pairs and a green "cross-checked" banner, so you can see which tier produced what you are reading.

↓ numbers

The unglamorous fix that mattered most

In V1, Arabic numerals had no jyutping and no reliable reading — a real hole, because news is full of them. V2 spells every number out the way an anchor reads it in context:

Every one of those characters gets jyutping, the voice reads it correctly, and saying the number right scores green.

↓ the curriculum

Eight categories of conversations you'll actually have

Alongside the news sit 96 scenario dialogues in 8 categories of 12: eating and drinking (cha chaan teng, dim sum, hotpot, splitting the bill), getting around (taxi, MTR, minibus, Star Ferry, the tram), shopping (wet market, Ladies' Market bargaining, returns), friends and small talk, office life, finance and deals, home and services, and health and weather.

Every line has speaker labels, an English gloss, neural audio with a distinct voice per speaker, and the same listen → speak → grade loop as the news. The content was written and then cross-checked by independent reviewers for naturalness and real-Hong-Kong accuracy.

↓ smaller things

Auto-play, and news that matches your work

Press A and the whole article plays hands-free, sentence by sentence — a podcast mode for shadowing or passive listening, which any manual action stops. Pre-synthesised neural Cantonese means a real anchor voice rather than the browser's robot, with a pitch-preserving speed control; the browser voice is only an offline fallback.

The build also reserves slots for a second news source alongside RTHK: a WeChat 公眾號 RSS bridge when configured, or with zero setup a scrape of fresh Chinese-language coverage of a specific firm, so the vocabulary you practise is the vocabulary your colleagues use.