Terms of Service
Last updated 2 October 2026 · Nihao is in beta
The short version
- Nihao is free during the beta. There is nothing to pay and nothing to cancel.
- It is a beta: expect rough edges, and don't rely on it as your only record of anything.
- Your account is yours. Don't share it, and don't try to break the service for other people.
- We own the app; you own what you write into it.
- You can leave whenever you like, and delete everything yourself from Settings.
- Nothing here takes away the rights French and EU consumer law gives you — it cannot, and we don't try.
1. These terms
Nihao ("the service") is a Mandarin Chinese learning web app operated by Star-48 ("we", "us"). These terms are the agreement between you and us. By creating an account or using the service you accept them. If you don't accept them, please don't use Nihao.
How we handle your personal data is set out separately in our Privacy Policy, which forms part of this agreement.
2. Who may use Nihao
You must be at least 16 years old. By signing in you confirm you are, and that the information your sign-in provider gives us is accurate. One account per person, and your account is personal to you — please don't share your sign-in with anyone else.
3. This is a beta
Nihao is an early product under active development, offered free of charge. That has consequences we would rather state plainly than bury:
- Features may change, move or disappear, and the service may be unavailable at times, with or without warning.
- Bugs can lose data. We take backups and we try hard not to, but during a beta you should not treat Nihao as the only record of anything that matters to you.
- Learning content is generated in part automatically and can be wrong. Nihao is a study aid, not a teacher, a translator or a qualified source. Please don't rely on it for anything consequential — an exam answer, a translation that matters, a contract, a medical or legal word.
- It is free today. If we ever introduce paid plans we will say so clearly in advance, and we will never start charging you for something you are already using without asking you first.
4. Your account
You sign in with Google, Apple or an email link — we never hold a password. Keep access to that sign-in method secure; anyone who has it has your account. Tell us promptly if you think someone else is using it.
Two things in Settings are deliberate and irreversible. Reset progress clears your learning history and starts you over. Delete account removes your account and everything attached to it, permanently. Neither can be undone and neither asks us first, so please read the confirmation before you press it.
5. What we ask of you
Use Nihao to learn Chinese. Please don't:
- break the law with it, or use it to harm, harass or impersonate anyone;
- try to get around the sign-in, reach another person's data, or probe the service for vulnerabilities without asking us first (if you find one, please email us — we will thank you);
- scrape it, resell it, or drive it with a script or bot rather than by using the app as a person would;
- deliberately burn through the service's capacity, or work around the daily fair-use limits described below;
- feed it text designed to make the automated parts misbehave, or upload anything unlawful through the feedback box;
- copy the app's code or content to build a competing product.
Fair use. The automated parts of Nihao cost real money per request, so there are daily per-person limits on automated grading, session planning, sentence generation and reading text aloud. They sit far above normal study — several sessions a day will not reach them. If you do pass one, nothing errors: the app quietly falls back to its rule-based behaviour until the next day.
6. Who owns what
Ours
The app, its design, its name and logo, its curriculum and the way its exercises are put together belong to us or to our licensors. Using Nihao gives you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable right to use it for your own learning — and nothing more. It does not transfer any ownership to you.
Yours
What you write stays yours: your answers, and anything you send through the feedback box. You give us only the permission we need to actually run the service — to store your answers, show them back to you, grade them, and build your next session from them. For feedback you send us, you also allow us to use it to improve Nihao. We do not claim ownership of your content and we do not use it to train AI models.
Attribution
Nihao's stroke-order animations use character data from the Make Me a Hanzi project, extracted from fonts by Arphic Technology Co., Ltd. and used under the Arphic Public License. That data remains under its own licence, not these terms.
7. Availability and changes
We offer no uptime guarantee during the beta. We may change, suspend or discontinue any part of the service. If we discontinue Nihao altogether we will give you reasonable notice by email and a way to export your data before it goes.
We may update these terms as the product changes. The date at the top always says when. For a change that materially affects you we will give you reasonable notice in the app or by email before it takes effect; continuing to use Nihao afterwards means you accept the new version, and if you would rather not, you can delete your account at any time.
8. Ending this agreement
You can stop at any time, for any reason, by deleting your account in Settings. No notice, no reason, no cost.
We may suspend or close your account if you seriously or repeatedly break section 5, or if we have to in order to comply with the law or protect the service or other people. Except where that is impossible or unlawful we will tell you why and give you a chance to respond, and where the breach can be fixed we will ask you to fix it first rather than close your account outright.
9. Liability
Nihao is provided free, as a beta, "as is". To the fullest extent French law allows, we give no guarantee that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that its learning content is accurate or suitable for any particular purpose.
We are liable for damage we cause you by failing to meet our obligations, but — again to the extent the law allows, and given that the service is free — not for indirect or unforeseeable loss, nor for lost profit, lost opportunity or loss of data beyond what reasonable backups would have prevented.
What we never exclude. Nothing in these terms limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or gross negligence, or for anything else the law does not allow us to exclude. If you use Nihao as a consumer, you keep every mandatory right French and EU consumer law gives you — including the legal guarantee of conformity under the French Consumer Code — and any term here that conflicts with those rights simply does not apply to you.
10. Law and disputes
These terms are governed by French law. If you are a consumer resident in the EU, this choice does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory rules of your own country of residence, and you may bring proceedings in the courts of that country.
Please email us first — almost everything is faster to fix that way. If we cannot resolve it, EU consumers may use the European Commission's online dispute resolution platform at ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr, or a French consumer mediator. Otherwise the competent French courts have jurisdiction.
11. The rest
If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands. Not enforcing something once doesn't mean we give it up. You may not transfer this agreement to someone else; we may transfer it if our business does, and we will tell you if that happens. Together with the Privacy Policy, this is the whole agreement between us about Nihao.
Contact
Star-48 — stephane@star48.io