Why we built Zen Reader

Zen Reader started with a homework sheet I couldn’t read.

I’m Phil Wade. I live in Singapore, and like a lot of parents here I have a child learning Chinese at school — while I don’t read a word of it.

Every week the same thing happened. A book came home to be read aloud, and I had no idea whether what I was hearing was right. A 听写 list arrived, and I couldn’t test them on it. A worksheet came back with a mark on it, and I couldn’t tell what had gone wrong, let alone explain it. I could sit beside my child and be encouraging, but I could not actually help. Their teachers were doing their part; the gap was at our kitchen table, in the twenty minutes of reading practice a night where it was just the two of us.

What I wanted was simple to describe and, until recently, impossible to build: something that listens to a child read Chinese aloud, tells them gently which characters they got right, and then tells me, in English, how it went.

So I built it.

Zen Reader listens to your child read, marks every character and checks their Mandarin tones. It turns the school’s character and spelling lists into practice and tests, and marks a photo of their handwriting. It guides them through a worksheet with hints rather than answers. And it reports all of it back to you in plain English.

What we believe

You stay the parent. You choose the books, the word lists and the spelling lists. Zen Reader does the Chinese — it doesn’t decide what your child should be learning.

It belongs alongside school and tuition, not instead of them. The books, character lists and 听写 lists in Zen Reader are the ones your child’s teachers set. We don’t write the syllabus, we don’t teach the class, and we don’t replace a teacher or a tutor — we make the practice between lessons count, and report it back in a language you can read. With the family’s permission, a school or tuition teacher can be linked to a child and see how the reading is really going between lessons.

Encouraging, never a red pen. A child who is nervous about reading aloud will not practise. Every report is written to be read by a child first: what went well, then what to try again.

Your family’s data is your family’s. Voice recordings and a child’s work are personal in a way most app data isn’t. We handle them under Singapore’s PDPA, we don’t sell data, and the analytics that would identify your family are off unless you turn them on. The detail is in our Privacy Policy.

It should work on whatever you own. Windows, Android, iPhone, iPad and Mac, with one family library synced between them — because the reading happens on whatever device is to hand.

Who makes it

Zen Reader is made by Datgel Asia Pte. Ltd., a Singapore company. Datgel has built professional software for engineers for years; Zen Reader is our first app for families, and it’s built to the same standard — it’s the one our own children use.

It’s a small team, which is the point: you can email us and reach the people who made the thing. If something is wrong, or your child’s school does something ours doesn’t handle yet, we’d genuinely like to hear it.

Phil Wade Founder, Zen Reader — Datgel Asia Pte. Ltd., Singapore