Taipei, Taiwan – Ming Fu Design Inc., a developer of Chinese language eLearning systems, is proud to announce its Chinese New Year promotion. For a limited time, its iPhone app ManManLai Chinese is available for free from the Apple App Store.

“The Year of the Horse starts this week, and it is expected to be a stellar year for risk takers and students who want to advance their skills,” said Ming Fu’s Managing Director, Matthew Sinclair-Day. “Our focus is on delivering excellent engineering design that advances the field of language study, and we want as many students as possible to benefit from ManManLai.”

Available for all iOS devices, ManManLai’s integrated mobile learning environment helps Chinese language students master vocabulary and practice drawing Chinese characters. Powering the app is a large English-Chinese dictionary and search engine.

“We designed ManManLai to be a faithful companion, always at hand and ready to assist in learning Chinese,” says Sinclair-Day. “I use it everyday here in Taipei. It allows me to look up Chinese characters as they are seen on the street, and track words when I hear them in conversation and on the radio.”

According to Ming Fu’s lead engineer, Xuan-Ming Dai, “Chinese is a difficult language because it is not alphabetic like English. Students have to master hundreds of characters and character combinations, which takes time and dedication. But we built ManManLai for the long run. Language learners can rely on it day to day.”

ManManLai includes HSK (Standard Mandarin Chinese proficiency exam) vocabulary organized into four lists, from Beginner to Advanced levels.

“The HSK vocabulary lists serve as a simple and effective study guide. The words and phrases are organized by level, and the most essential and common ones are followed by increasingly difficult and advanced ones,” says Sinclair-Day.

All characters and words can be hand drawn on the screen.

“One of the best ways to anchor Chinese in memory is to draw the character over and over,” says Sinclair-Day. “That’s so easy and effortless now using ManManLai because no paper or pen is needed.”

The app’s design promotes both structured learning and free-form exploration.

“Students also need the freedom to explore and make their own mental and linguistic connections between different characters and words,” says engineer Dai. “So, we set out to blur the distinction between a learning tool and dictionary. We wanted to create an environment that promotes self-study and mastery.”

At its core, ManManLai is built on a Chinese-English dictionary containing over 100,000 entries. The entire corpus is searchable allowing for quick look-ups by Chinese Hanzi characters, Pinyin and other romanization schemes, and English definitions.

The fully-integrated flash card system is easily invoked, making any Learning Set, History list, or test preparation vocabulary list instantly available for a practice session and quick review.

Feature Highlights:
* Unified corpus comprising over 100,000 entries
* Powerful search engine
* Character drawing canvas for each entry in the corpus
* Integrated Chinese proficiency exam preparation vocabulary
* Learning Sets for organizing vocabulary
* Automatic History, saved searches, and automatically flagged entries
* Fully supports simplified and traditional Chinese characters

Device Requirements:
* iPhone, iPad, iPod touch
* Requires iOS 4.3 or later
* Optimized for iPhone 5
* Universal Application
* 68.1 MB

Pricing and Availability:
For a limited time, ManManLai Chinese 1.2 is Free and available worldwide exclusively through the App Store in the Education category.

Ming Fu Design
ManManLai Chinese 1.2
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Ming Fu Design Inc. offers expert software engineering and product development services for iPhone, Android, and server. Based in Taiwan, Ming Fu works with clients globally. MSD Services is a small company based in Boston and Taipei inspired to build a Chinese learning system. Copyright (C) 2014 Ming Fu Design Inc. All Rights Reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, iPhone, iPod and iPad are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries.