The Shanghainese app: all the lessons are drafts
An offline, audio-first course for Mandarin speakers. The app and recording pipeline work; the course content is not yet cleared to ship.
The Shanghainese learning app is an offline, audio-first course for Mandarin speakers. It is a React Native app with unit lessons, spaced review and self-judged pronunciation practice: a learner hears the recording, says the phrase, hears themselves against the recording and decides whether it was close enough.
Where it stands
The README is direct about the gap between the software and the course:
- The app and the recording pipeline work, with a partial authoring corpus.
- All nine lesson units are drafts. All 180 current phrases have draft Simplified Chinese meanings; a native speaker still has to review them.
- Public builds are blocked until the roughly 500-phrase course has confirmed Wugniu readings and approved recordings.
- A pilot corpus is kept for the maintainer but excluded from the app bundle.
The decisions behind the audio, the romanisation and the practice screen are written down
in docs/audio-strategy.md, docs/romanisation.md and docs/pronunciation.md, and the
README asks that they be read before those areas are edited. npm run course:status
prints the current counts.
What the commit history shows
There are 39 commits from 6 September to 10 October. The early ones are about the content pipeline: verifying generated files against what the app expects, recording each sentence once rather than once per phrase that uses it, reporting repeated phrase text, and reading the notes (備註) column of the source data to take the open pronunciation readings from 35 down to 7.
The later ones are about making it a real app: prebuilding and signing for iOS, adopting UIScene so it launches on iOS 26 and later, setting the audio session so tapped phrases are actually audible, trimming recordings on speech instead of on the click before it, and keeping a unit’s review inside that unit.
The date
The README targets a public iOS and Android release on 30 June 2027. This project has no Reminders list, so there are no dated sub-tasks for it; the date below is the one stated in its README.
Written on 16 Oct 2026 from the repository’s README and commit history.