What's new

Notes on the Pocket Taiwan phrasebook app and its free, walkable Raohe Night Market experience.

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6 October 2026

Pocket Taiwan is available on iPhone

Pocket Taiwan is now available on the App Store, alongside the Android version. The phrasebook focuses on everyday situations in Taiwan, with Traditional Chinese, Taiwan-focused pronunciation, audio, and the replies you are likely to hear.

Explore Pocket Taiwan World

The free browser version lets you walk through a recreation of Raohe Night Market, practice ordering and answering vendor follow-ups, and tap market objects to learn their words. Conversations need an internet connection. See how the night-market game works or play it now.

11 September 2026

Pocket Taiwan World

Raohe Night Market, rebuilt as a place you can walk through. Order at stalls that only speak Mandarin, answer the follow-up, and tap market objects to learn their words. The browser version is free, and Pocket Taiwan World is also available from the app's home screen.

New phrases

Restaurant seating gained 已經有人到了／已經有人在裡面 for when your table is already there. Taxi gained 麻煩跳錶, please use the meter. Two rental lines were corrected: 有廚房嗎？ and 有停車位嗎？.

25 August 2026

Review mode

Tap ♡ on any phrase and it joins your reviews. They come back on a spaced schedule — minutes at first, then days, then months — and the ones you keep forgetting come round more often. By default you're shown the English and recall the Chinese; a button flips it the other way, and it's one card either way, not two.

Review works on the free situations too, not just the paid ones. If you'd rather not have it, Settings has an on/off switch — turning it off hides it and keeps every card, so switching back on picks up where you left off.

Back up your favorites

Your favorites and review progress live on your phone — there's no account and nothing is uploaded. They survive app updates and reinstalls, but a new phone starts fresh. Settings now has Back up my data, which saves everything to a file, and Restore from a backup to load it on the new device. Restoring merges rather than replaces, so an old backup can't wipe newer work.

Paying, in one question

Card, Apple Pay, Line Pay and cash used to sit as four separate phrases in every Pay tab. They're now the answers to 你要怎麼付？ — the question the cashier actually asks. Bubble tea shops gained a Pay tab of their own.

24 August 2026

Character-by-character, fixed

When a phrase offers two ways of saying something — 水槽／馬桶堵住了 — the breakdown now spells each one out in full instead of leaving you a fragment. English words inside a phrase (Wi-Fi, Line Pay, ATM) are shown as themselves rather than being read as pinyin, which had been shifting every character after them onto the wrong reading.

Showing a phrase to someone

Holding up 水槽／馬桶堵住了 asked the other person to read both options at once. Show mode now displays one, with a tap to switch between them, and Listen reads each option in full rather than saying the slash out loud.

Ordering, the way people say it

Phrases you'd say at a counter now lead with 我要 rather than being bare nouns — 我要一杯拿鐵, not just 一杯拿鐵. Night market street food and braised dishes became pick-lists, so you tap what you want instead of scrolling past thirty items.