Zhenzhu is a native macOS app for reading real Chinese and turning what you read into flashcards. Select or hover over Chinese in supported Mac apps, or snip any part of the screen to read text in images, PDFs, games and paused videos (OCR). You get pinyin, definitions, HSK level, a sentence translation and a word-by-word breakdown.

When you find a word worth keeping, save it together with its sentence as a card, either in the built-in FSRS flashcards or sent to Anki with audio and images. That makes it a sentence-mining tool for immersion learners, not just a dictionary.

Why it's useful: browser popup dictionaries like Zhongwen only work inside the browser, and there's no native Mac equivalent to Pleco. Zhenzhu works across the rest of your Mac.

Free for unlimited dictionary lookup and sentence translation, with limited OCR and Anki exports per month. Pro is a one-time purchase. Requires macOS 15+. Disclosure: I'm the developer.