Terms of service

HSK Guide is an independent platform for learning Mandarin Chinese and preparing for the HSK and HSKK examinations. These terms govern your use of the website, the application and everything served from them. By creating an account or using the platform you accept them.

Two other documents form part of this agreement: the privacy policy, which explains what we do with data, and the examination affiliation statement, which explains our relationship — or rather the absence of one — with the official examination authorities. Where they conflict with this document on their own subject, they win.

• You must be at least 16 to create an account yourself. Between 13 and 16 you may use the platform through a school or with a parent or guardian who accepts these terms on your behalf. We do not knowingly provide the service to anyone under 13.
• Give an email address you can actually receive mail at. It is how you recover access, and we have no other way to prove an account is yours.
• Your credentials are yours. You are responsible for what happens under your account until you tell us it has been compromised.
• One account per person. Sharing a single account across a class is not a way to avoid seats, and it destroys the scheduling that makes the platform work — every learner’s review history would be mixed into one.
• A school or organisation may create accounts for learners it has enrolled, under a written agreement, and remains responsible for having the right to do so.

Dictionary entries, grammar explanations, lessons, stories, scenarios, examination practice material and articles are our editorial work, or are licensed to us. You get a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use them to learn — including printing or saving a page for your own study, and using them in your own teaching if you hold a seat that allows it.

What that right does not cover:

• Bulk extraction. Scraping, crawling beyond ordinary browsing, or systematically downloading the dictionary or any other library.
• Redistribution or resale, including republishing entries as your own material or bundling them into another product.
• Using the content as training data for a machine-learning model.
• Removing attribution, source notes or the labels that mark material as unofficial.

Automated access for research or interoperability is not forbidden in principle — ask us first and we will usually say yes with a rate limit and an attribution requirement.

Your notes, mnemonics, custom decks, the sentences you submit for correction, your tutor conversations and any voice recordings you choose to keep belong to you. You grant us only the licence we need to run the service: to store them, show them back to you, process them to produce feedback and scheduling, and back them up.

We do not use your content to train models. When a hosted model provider is configured, requests are sent under terms that exclude training on submitted data. You can delete individual items, delete all your recordings in one action, and delete your account with everything in it.

If you send us a correction or a suggestion through the contact form, you allow us to act on it and to incorporate the fix into the platform. We will not publish your name against it without asking.

• Do not attempt to bypass rate limits, free-plan allowances, examination timers or audio play-count rules. The examination timer runs on the server precisely so that this is not worth trying.
• Do not upload unlawful material, or material that infringes someone else’s rights.
• Do not use the AI tutor as a general-purpose assistant for things unrelated to learning Chinese. It will decline, and persistent abuse is a reason to suspend an account.
• Do not probe, scan or stress the service, or attempt to access another learner’s data. Responsible security reports are welcome through the contact form and will never be met with legal threats.
• Do not resell access, or use an institutional seat for someone who is not one of your learners.

The plans, their prices and exactly what each one includes are on the pricing page, which forms part of these terms. Prices are in euros. Consumer prices include VAT where it applies; institutional customers are invoiced with VAT shown separately.

• A paid subscription renews automatically at the end of each period until you cancel. You are told the renewal date in Settings → Billing.
• You can cancel at any time from Settings → Billing. Cancellation stops the next renewal; the subscription keeps working until the end of the period you have already paid for, and the account then returns to the free plan. Nothing is deleted.
• If you are a consumer in the EU you have a statutory right of withdrawal within fourteen days of taking out a new subscription. We honour it without asking for a reason.
• We may change prices. An existing subscriber is told at least thirty days before a change takes effect, and a change never applies to a period already paid for. If you do not accept it, cancel before it takes effect.
• Institutional seats are governed by an order form or written quotation, which prevails over this section where they differ.
• A failed payment does not delete anything. The subscription moves to a past-due state, you are told, and the account returns to the free plan if it is not resolved.

The free plan is not a trial and has no end date. It carries daily allowances — reviews, tutor messages, pronunciation attempts — which are set per deployment and shown on the pricing page. We may change those allowances, and will announce a reduction in advance rather than applying it silently.

One commitment we will not walk back: the open reference library — the dictionary, the vocabulary, character and radical pages, and the grammar library — stays readable without an account. It is the part of this platform that ought to be a public good, and putting it behind a login later would be a betrayal of why it was built.

All practice material is original, written for HSK Guide, and unofficial. HSK Guide is not affiliated with or endorsed by Chinese Testing International or the official HSK examination authorities. We do not register candidates, we do not issue results or certificates, and we cannot tell you the current rules of an examination — go to the examination authority or your registered test centre for that.

Where the platform shows a figure taken from a published standard, it shows the source and the date an editor last verified it, or states that it has not yet been verified. Read that label before you rely on the number.

We work to keep the platform available and correct, but we do not offer an uptime guarantee on consumer plans. Maintenance happens; where it is planned and disruptive, we announce it. Institutional agreements may include a service level, in which case that document governs.

Features change. We add, improve and occasionally retire things. We will not remove a feature you are currently paying for in the middle of a period you have paid for without offering a refund of the unused part.

You can delete your account at any time from Settings → Your data. Export first if you want to keep anything: deletion removes your progress, notes, recordings and history, and it is not reversible.

We may suspend or close an account that materially breaches these terms. Except where the breach is unlawful, abusive, or a security risk, you will be told first and given a chance to put it right, and you will be able to export your data. If we close a paid account without cause, we refund the unused part of the period.

To the extent the law allows, the platform is provided as it is, and we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost study time, or for the outcome of any examination you sit.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited — including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, and for your statutory rights as a consumer, which these terms do not affect. Where liability can be limited, our aggregate liability is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim.

We will publish a new version here with a new date. For a material change affecting a paid subscriber we give at least thirty days’ notice by email or in the application, and the change does not apply retroactively to a period already paid for. Continuing to use the platform after a change takes effect means you accept it; if you do not, cancel and, where you are within a paid period you can no longer use as agreed, ask us for the unused part back.

The governing law and the competent courts are stated in the operator details that must be completed before launch. If you are a consumer, this choice never deprives you of the protection of the mandatory rules of the country where you live, and you may always bring a claim in your own courts.

Before anything formal, write to us. Consumers in the EU may also use the European Commission’s online dispute resolution platform. Every message sent through the contact form is written to a tracked queue with a reference, so a complaint cannot quietly disappear.