What it is
I built this because I couldn't find a free place to practice the boring parts of Chinese. Typing tones. Getting stroke order right. Knowing which measure word goes with which noun.
It's 46 pages now, and 25 of those are tools or resource pages. The pinyin chart is the one people use most. The stroke order page animates each character. There's a transport simulator that runs real airport and subway conversations, plus a hospital one, because those are the two situations where I froze hardest.
All of it is static HTML, CSS, and vanilla JS. No backend, no database, no login page. The audio is the browser's own speech synthesis. I call it that instead of dressing it up as an AI tutor.
How the traffic looks
I'd rather post the real numbers than a win story.
Eight days of Cloudflare data: 93 page views, 71 sessions, 66 of them real humans once I strip the bots. About one visit in nine came from a search engine. Zero backlinks.
That last number is the one that matters and it's the one I can't buy.
Ranking on Google is out of reach from where I build, so I'm working Bing, which is maybe a tenth of the English market. What gets indexed, gets indexed slowly.
One thing did catch me off guard. A ChatGPT share link turned up as a referrer. Somebody pasted a page into a conversation and clicked through. It's nofollow, so it earns no ranking credit, but it means the content is reaching people somehow.
Three weeks in, mobile was at 50% of sessions for a day. Four countries, all phones.
People learn Chinese on the bus, not at a desk.
What's next
The 500-phrase PDF is the only paid thing, at $9.90. Everything else stays free.
If you've run a domain with no backlinks and no traffic, I'd like to hear what moved the needle for you.
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