Studying Classical Chinese with the Four Books App

The bulk of this post will be a review of the Four Books iOS app (also available for Android), developed by Daoxue Academy, an aid in studying the Four Books of the Confucian canon (the Great Learning, Analects, Mencius, and Doctrine of the Mean). Rather than just giving an overview of the app’s features, though, I’m going to focus on how I personally use the app, which necessitates spending some time talking about my experiences studying Classical Chinese and the Confucian canon. This approach will let readers know what basis I’m using to evaluate the app, and, I hope, allow others to benefit from my experience.

For those who just want a quick thumbs-up or -down, though, here it is: The Four Books app is extremely useful for anyone wanting to understand the core of the Confucian canon. The translation provided is solid, but the key to what makes the app invaluable is the inclusion, and prominence given to, the commentaries by Zhu Xi, which have served as the definitive interpretation of these texts since he wrote them in the twelfth century. These have been difficult or impossible to obtain in English (an exception being Johnston and Wang’s edition of the Great Learning and Doctrine of the Mean, which also include earlier commentaries and which I’ve reviewed previously). The only caveat is that the app is still under some development; currently, only the Great Learning and part of the Analects are complete, but more is added regularly, as are other feature updates. Regardless, it’s already well polished and a must-have for anyone interested in studying Confucianism in a remotely serious way.

Now, let’s take a step back and talk a bit about my own experience. After dabbling in Mandarin off-and-on for a while, earlier this year I decided to try learning Classical Chinese, since that’s the language that most of the Chinese works I’m interested in reading are written in. Primarily, I’d like to read the Confucian canon, but I’m also very interested in the Confucians’ rival schools of the Warring States period. I started with this free online course from Stanford, written by Sinologist Mark Edward Lewis, since I’ve seen it recommended by a couple people, including my Twitter mutual Solzi (who, incidentally, is also the person behind Daoxue Academy). It was very effective, and I like that it focuses on reading from real, and interesting, texts written in Classical Chinese. Lewis does a good job explaining relevant grammatical points without, on the one hand, overwhelming the student with technical terminology, or on the other, oversimplifying and coming across as condescending. The overall approach reminds me of French for Reading, the book that taught me how to read that language.

After completing Lewis’s course, I needed to find something else. My university’s library had a few options, but none seemed suitable. Besides one or two reference books, the two textbooks available both assumed more familiarity with modern Chinese than I have. (As an aside, I wonder if any Latin textbooks assume familiarity with Italian.) Fortunately, I already had the Four Books app, and though I generally prefer physical books over apps or ebooks, I knew the app had several features that would help advance my Chinese skills:

1. Books I actually want to read. As of August 2026, it only has the Great Learning and part of the Analects, but this is enough to get started. As mentioned above, the rest of the Four Books are forthcoming and more is added regularly.
2. Built-in dictionary. I can tap a word and see a brief definition of what it means in context. As in English, words are often used in multiple ways, but the app only shows the meaning in that particular instance.
3. Ability to toggle between displaying only Chinese or Chinese and English. So, I can begin by focusing on just the Chinese, then check my understanding with a translation. (For anyone wondering, English-only is also an option).
4. Zhu Xi’s commentaries and other supporting material. These are more immediately relevant to the study of Confucianism than to the language, but it can only help to have the further explications, glosses of key terms, and reminders of, say, who Zengzi is.

So, concretely, how do I use the app?

First, viewing the page in Chinese-only, I copy a line by hand in Chinese. The physical action reinforces the shape, reading, and meaning of each character in my mind, and ensures that I work at a slow, methodical pace, avoiding skipping ahead, merely skimming a line. Next, in red ink, I go back and copy new characters again, along with their (Mandarin) reading and a definition. I begin with the app’s definition, but will often also look up a word in the excellent dictionary app Pleco using the add-on A Student’s Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese to get a fuller definition. Finally, in blue ink, I write out an extremely literal, mostly word-by-word translation. When I feel like I have a grasp of the meaning, I’ll turn on the English display to see the translation, and read Zhu Xi’s commentary. So far, my experience from Lewis’s course and the help from the translation and commentary have been enough for me to understand how a sentence is put together, though a couple times I’ve also handed a line to Monsieur Claude when I want further detail on the grammatical function of some character.

The commentaries, by the way, are also available in both Chinese and English, but so far I have not attempted translating them since they’re Medieval, not Classical, Chinese.

The big question now, of course, is how effective this method is. After working through the entirety of the Great Learning, I’ve made significant progress. It’s a relatively short work, but in general, reading has become noticeably easier as I’ve progressed, gradually expanding my vocabulary and gaining more experience with how the language is constructed. The sections I still really lean on the translation and commentary for are the quotations from the Book of Odes, which, to be fair, are in a higher register and older than the main text. I haven’t quantified this, but it seems like Zhu Xi felt the need to gloss a disproportionate number of the characters used here for being old-fashioned or literary.

A few final points about the app:

• It’s well polished. I said above that it’s under development, so I’ll direct you to the website for screenshots and a full feature list, but everything functions well and it’s visually appealing. The only feature I might add is some kind of highlighting and annotation function.
• I’ve been referring to “Zhu Xi’s” commentaries, but it’s worth noting that he frequently refers to other scholars and includes their comments as well. Their names are highlighted within the app, and tapping them will bring up a brief biography and links to other verses where they’re quoted.
• Names and certain key terms appearing within the texts themselves are also highlighted, with a brief biography and links to other places they appear. Very nifty.
• The app also includes a search function, so if you’d like to see every instance of a character you can easily search for it.
• Solzi attempts to rectify some names, consistently referring to Confucius as “Master Kong,” Mencius as “Mengzi,” and the Analects as the Discourses. I don’t feel strongly about this, but it’s more distracting than clarifying.
• In any case, the point about names is really the only thing I can say that even approaches a criticism, and it’s more a difference of opinion on something debatable. I recommend the app 100% to anyone even remotely interested in the Confucian canon, or as a help in studying Classical Chinese.

Finally, now that I’ve done the Great Learning, what will I work through next? I’m beginning with the Analects (er, Discourses), or at least the portions included in the app so far. Once I exhaust those, I may bring out my physical copy of James Legge’s translation, since it includes both the Chinese and English, and Legge includes a lot of commentary. We’ll see how it works out.