Four Books: Confucian Classics
Four Books: Confucian Classics has 32 installs, #43,244 of 52,865 in Books & Reference.
Description
The Four Books App is a book reader and scholarly utility which presents the traditional Confucian curriculum: the Great Learning, the Discourses of Confucius (the Analects), the Book of Mengzi (Mencius), and the Doctrine of the Mean. A six-year translation project in progress. New verses arrive in the app around the first of each month.
-- Ancient Teachings, Correct Transmission, Modern Tech --
Traditional Interpretation
• A public benefit project to translate Zhu Xi’s “Four Books with Collected Commentaries” 四書章句集注: the classic that defined orthodox Confucianism and served as the basis of the imperial examinations from 1313 to 1905.
Established Lexicon
• Builds upon the translation lexicon perfected by Wing-tsit Chan (A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy), with roots going back to James Legge (The Chinese Classics). Honoring lineage—with conservative refinements. Uses modern pinyin, of course.
Learn Classical Chinese
• Study Classical and Middle Chinese with literal glosses for grammar and per-character meaning. Highly configurable dual-language presentation parsable by sentence.
Reading Experience
• Meticulous attention to readability: translation, typography, and a full-screen reader for tablets. This Classic deserves to be both scholarly and good reading, just as the native text is.
Optimized Multi-platform
• Phones feature an intuitive tab bar design for one-handed navigation, while tablets leverage a powerful sidebar for efficient browsing through verses. Designed for Android 16; runs on Android 10 and newer.
Android Native UI
• Pure Android native tech throughout: Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, with an embedded SQLite Confucian database for lightning-fast location of verses, key terms, named persons and named texts.
-- Basic App & Scholar Pack In-app Purchase --
Basic App:
• Core Ancient Verses: 284 most influential
• Language: English translation only
• Search: Basic, English-only
• Encyclopedia: Ancient figures only
Scholar Pack:
• All Ancient Verses: 804 complete
• Traditional Commentary
• Language: English & Classical Chinese
• Tap Character for Literal Gloss
• Full-Verse Literal Gloss Sheets
• Sentence-Level Parsing Tool
• Search: English & Chinese
• Encyclopedia: Ancient and medieval figures
• Book 5: Explanation of Terms
• No ads, no account creation, no data collection
• Small offline app, low battery usage
Scholar Pack is a single in-app purchase that includes everything above. It has a final target price, but is currently priced lower based on the percentage completion of the translation. One-time purchase, with all future content delivered free.
-- Reach Out --
Please contact us at [email protected], or using the in-app contact tools in settings, with questions or requests. We are committed to continual refinement and making this the optimal Confucian Classics app for both scholars and readers.
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Growth change in installs
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How these figures are measured
Change in installs, scaled to each window from the real gap between crawls. A window needs a full period of history before it reports anything.
Tracking since 2026-09-29. History accumulates as changes are observed — check back soon.
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