I started improving my Chinese this year. That meant confronting a problem I’ve been running away from since childhood.
Libraries were my refuge as a child: I read all the time and built my inner world with words. But only in English. My basic Chinese couldn’t yet take me to the depth I was looking for, so I followed the language that could. Seven-year-old me left my mother tongue in the dust.
Growing up in Singapore meant Chinese was always around me anyway. I understood everything people said, but practiced writing and speaking less and less.
As I grew older, the words would catch in my throat. I felt mute in the language I was supposed to call my own. My reading stayed stuck at an intermediate plateau.
Not being good at Chinese always felt like a personal failure: am I really Chinese if I can barely speak the language?
The missing blueprint
As I started learning again, I noticed most apps were missing what makes Chinese uniquely learnable.
Chinese characters are logographic–morphosyllabic. Each written unit (字) usually has a semantic component and a sound component.
Unlike alphabetic languages where words are simply spelled out, the writing itself carries meaning. Roughly 80–90% of Chinese characters are built this way: visual building blocks that tell you both what a word means and how it sounds.
It’s the only living writing system where words are built from meaningful visual parts, and those parts still generate new words today. (Japanese uses Kanji, but as a historical borrowing; Chinese characters remain a working, evolving system.)
If you’re not a “native” learner, you often miss this blueprint connecting spoken and written Chinese.
Most language learning apps, even those designed specifically for Chinese, treat each word as an independent unit to be memorized through repetition. They optimize for recall, not comprehension.
What Sidi does differently
Sidi is my answer to this gap. It’s a Chinese reading tool that gives you mental shortcuts for how characters are built, so you can recognize patterns instead of memorizing isolated symbols, and build real fluency.
It’s built as much for me as it is to serve an underserved category of learners.
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It optimizes for understanding. Apps like Duolingo privilege retention metrics, and lean heavily on dopamine loops and streaks over understanding. Sidi takes a different approach: slow learning, deeper comprehension. It’s less flashy, but for serious, long-term learners, it enables faster comprehension that sticks.
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It’s for serious learners. You don’t have to start from pinyin and basic nouns. This also works very well for heritage learners and second-generation speakers rebuilding their Chinese (those like me who understand more than they can speak).
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It taps into what makes Chinese uniquely learnable. Most apps teach like any alphabetic language, ignoring that Chinese characters are built from components that give you clues. While other tools focus on speaking and pronunciation, Sidi teaches you to read structure and recognize patterns.
Why “Sidi”?
Sidi is a play on the semantic component sì diǎn dǐ (灬), commonly called the four-dot radical. It’s a variant form of 火 (fire), but it rarely stands alone: it modifies meaning rather than being the meaning itself.
灬 is the context that transforms:
- 点 (diǎn): to mark / light / indicate
- 热 (rè): heat
- 然 (rán): so / thus → a resulting state
When 灬 appears in a character, it places the meaning in the domain of heat and transformation. Sometimes it signals a state change. An act of becoming.
I took to it instantly because it felt like where I am in life now. More saliently, it represents turning knowledge into understanding, which is what Sidi is all about.