- We’ve added in the ability to retain your progress. It will save the level you are on. This will ship with the next update of the app.
- The music does increase in speed as you progress and is a critical part of the game. We have had some users request the ability to turn off the music, so we are also planning to add the ability to switch it off and hear the characters only. - We have deliberately not added in pinyin for the reason you suggest. Native Chinese speakers don’t learn English so that they can use pinyin. Our current design and philosophy is to focus on immersion and being language agnostic. Whilst we understand that pinyin can help people with tones, we believe it is also distracting when you are learning and doesn’t allow you to focus on the characters. 
If you have any feedback or suggestions, please email me on hello@nativetongue.com.

thanks for the comment.

I definitely agree with the language agnostic idea, it’s just so hard to make it a solid app. User experience design needs to be flawless. I commend the creators with attempting such a an app though.

About the context, I definitely agree with that, but I also feel that learning some words out of context is not entirely detrimental. Flashcard software or any apps that just learn words can make for excellent speedy supplement to sentence or contextual learning. A mixed approach I think works well here.

“Do you speak English?”

The reason is that most of material out there is only in English. Hence I really like the idea of a language agnostic app. Then again, given the characteristic of Chinese language this may be difficult to realize…  
 
Also, I don’t like the idea of learning Chinese characters one by one. I believe that given the nature of this language, everything should be learned under the right context, that is through sentences.

This is why I like the idea of the Weibo corpus you outlined in a previous post ; )