Fanqie
2026-06-27
I had been studying Mandarin on and off for a while and recently stumbled upon the Mandarin Blueprint. This course utilises the Marilyn Method to help memorise chinese characters, modifying it more to fit the idea of create movie scenes.
Following this course I found there was a lot of ground for common tooling so decided to make another simple website to group these tools together.
Requirements
I wanted a simple, local, static website that anyone could use without needing to connect to any backend. This also meant I could utilise the same skills I learnt when developing Modern Boundary Solutions
Functionality wise I needed a way to store actors, sets, props so that they could be pieced together to create scenes that represent the meaning, pronunciation and character for different chinese characters.
This also meant I could implement a simple LLM connection that let users pull the different values and auto generate movie scene ideas to assist with the scene creation side.
The name came from the Pomodoro Technique. 番茄 (fānqié) means tomato in Mandarin. The name came first as I was thinking of the project and it was just a simple name that felt right but to match the origin of the name I felt I had to implement a simple timer system to help with daily tracking as well.
Some polish ideas fell around this like a calendar to show daily streaks.
The Stack
Having already built Modern Boundary Solutions with Astro and Svelte on Cloudflare Pages, I knew the combination worked well and at the time didn't want to trial anything new.
The resulting tech stack:
Outcome
The overall project was less about technical learning and more so about utilising high level understanding of the technology to create a tool that I found useful and could share with others.