About Wu Ji Bi Fan 物極必反

Wu Ji Bi Fan is a Taiwan Mandarin learning app that teaches Traditional characters with zhuyin or pinyin, plus TOCFL practice, for learners who want Chinese the way Taiwan writes and speaks it. It is coming to iPhone.

What Wu Ji Bi Fan does

Wu Ji Bi Fan trains you from white belt to black in a kung-fu dojo. Belts are levels, forms are lessons and sparring is review, and each belt ends in a belt test. Fourteen disciplines cover vocabulary, listening, stroke order, tone sparring, branching Taiwan scenarios, character parts, tone pairs, look-alikes, measure words, graded stories, sentence patterns and idioms. The course is built on the app's own graded list of 14,300 words and 3,525 characters. The TOCFL track adds a placement test, listening items, writing tasks with model answers, and mock papers laid out to the format tocfl.edu.tw publishes.

What makes it different

  • Taiwan first, not a font switch. Taiwan-standard readings and Taiwan words, such as 捷運 for the MRT and 影片 rather than 視頻, with Traditional characters only.
  • Zhuyin or pinyin. Read with 注音 (bopomofo), the way Taiwan learns it, or with pinyin, and switch any time in your profile.
  • Tones scored on the device. Say a word and see your pitch contour drawn over the model, with each syllable marked right or wrong. Scoring runs on your iPhone and is never uploaded.
  • Private by design. No account, no sign-up and no email address. The whole course works offline, with no ads and no third-party analytics. Read the privacy policy.
  • Honest about the TOCFL. A mock paper reports the share you got right and the level that suggests. No practice app can turn that into an official TOCFL score, because TOCFL does not publish a conversion.

Who it is for

  • Learners who want Taiwan Mandarin, 台灣華語, rather than mainland readings with the characters swapped.
  • TOCFL candidates who want to find their level and practise in the format the test is set in.
  • Learners who want to read with zhuyin, as Taiwan schools teach it, or with pinyin.
  • People getting ready for daily life in Taiwan. The scenarios include a 7-Eleven at night, the MRT at Taipei Main Station, renting a flat and a job interview.

Who makes it

Wu Ji Bi Fan is built by an independent developer. It is coming to iPhone and will run on iOS 26 or later. White and yellow belts are free to start. Wu Ji Bi Fan is an independent app, not affiliated with or endorsed by the organisers of the TOCFL. For questions, use the support page.

TOCFL numbers

For the official numbers, read the TOCFL score chart: SC-TOP's certificate cut-offs and single-skill pass scores as real tables, with worked examples.