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Hanzi Movie Studio: Learning Chinese with AI-Generated Movie Scenes

Learning Chinese characters is hard. You need around 3,000 to read a newspaper. Each character encodes meaning, pronunciation, and tone – and your brain has to recall all three at once.

Most people try flashcards and repetition. It works, but it's slow and feels like vocabulary drills from school. There's a better way – and an app that makes it work: Hanzi Movie Studio (runs in your browser, no sign-up needed).

The Hanzi Movie Method

The method was developed by Phil Crimmins and Luke Neale, founders of Mandarin Blueprint. It builds on an older system called "The Marilyn Method" by Serge Gorodish. The core idea: you store each character as a short movie scene in your head.

Here's how it works:

• Actors stand for the initial sound. You pick people you know well, real or fictional.
• Sets are the final sound. Places you can vividly picture: your childhood home, your office, a friend's apartment.
• Rooms encode the tone. The bathroom is tone 4, the kitchen is tone 1.
• Props are the radicals, the visual building blocks of the character.
• The script ties everything together: a short, absurd scene where the actor interacts with the props to illustrate the character's meaning.

Sounds like a lot of work? It is. You need a unique movie scene for every single character. For the 300 characters in HSK Band 1, that's 300 creative writing exercises.

The Problem

I used the method manually for a while. Assigned actors, defined sets, picked props. All in a spreadsheet. Then I sat down to write scripts – short stories absurd enough to stick, but coherent enough to convey meaning.

After 30 characters, I knew this wouldn't scale. Each script takes 5–10 minutes of creative work. At 300 characters, that's 25–50 hours of pure scriptwriting.

The Solution: Let AI Write the Scripts

The method's structure is formalized: actor, set, room, props, meaning. That makes it a good prompt for a language model.

So I built Hanzi Movie Studio. You set up your personal toolkit (actors, sets, props), select a character, and the app generates a script via Google's Gemini API.

The result is a movie scene in your language, with your actors, at your set. All you have to do is read it and visualize.

What the App Does

• Toolkit management – Create and assign actors, sets, and props
• Script generation – One click via Gemini API, based on your toolkit
• Text-to-speech – Hear the Chinese pronunciation directly in the app
• Reading exercises – AI-generated short stories using your learned characters
• Progress tracking – SRS-based review schedule
• Export/Import – Back up your data as JSON or export to Anki

Tech Stack

Deliberately simple:

• React + TypeScript – UI framework
• Vite – Build tool
• Google Gemini API – Script generation and TTS
• Cloudflare Pages – Hosting (free tier)
• localStorage – All data stays in your browser, no backend

No server, no database. The app runs entirely in the browser. Your data stays yours.

Try It

The app is live at hanzi.martin-moeller.biz. No account needed – everything happens locally in your browser.

If you're learning Chinese and want to try the Hanzi Movie Method: set up a few actors and sets, pick a character, and generate a script. The first few scenes feel weird. After 20 characters, you'll notice you can recall them without thinking.