Terms of use.

01 Accepting these terms

By installing or using Little Orchid, or by using this website, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, do not use the app.

Little Orchid is intended for primary-school children but is designed to be installed and configured by an adult. If you are under the age of majority where you live, you may use the app only with the involvement of a parent, guardian or teacher, and that adult accepts these terms on your behalf and is responsible for any purchase. If you are that adult and you set the app up for a child, you accept these terms for both of you.

These terms are supplemented by our Privacy Policy, which forms part of them. Where you obtained the app from a store, that store's own terms also apply to the transaction.

02 Your licence to use the app

We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to install and use Little Orchid on devices you own or control, for personal, family, or ordinary classroom teaching use.

You may set up as many learner profiles as your plan allows, and use the app with your own children or the pupils you teach. You do not need a separate licence per child in a household.

The app is licensed, not sold. We keep all rights we do not expressly grant here.

03 What you may not do

• Extract, scrape, decompile or otherwise separate the bundled content — the curriculum pack, the audio recordings, the stroke templates, the radical data or the font — in order to republish, redistribute, resell or build a competing product from it.
• Reverse engineer the app except to the limited extent that applicable law expressly permits and cannot be excluded by agreement.
• Remove, obscure or alter any copyright, licence or attribution notice.
• Sell, rent, sublicense or share access to a paid subscription outside your own household or the class you teach.
• Use the app unlawfully, or in a way that infringes someone else's rights.

Nothing here restricts your normal use of the study material with the children in your care — including writing the characters out, or reading the example sentences aloud in a lesson.

04 The free tier

Without paying anything you get the first four lessons of every level from Primary 1 to Primary 6, all six practice modes, the full handwriting pad with stroke checking, the mistake book, one learner profile, and a daily budget of seven new words and sixty reviews per level. It does not expire.

我的听写表 · My spelling lists is free as well: as many custom 听写 lists as you like, built by typing the words in, pasting the teacher's message, speaking the list aloud, or opening a list another parent shared — plus 3 photo pages a month for reading a worksheet with the camera. The test date, the archive, the drill, the mistake book and 全部复习 are free too.

The packaged curriculum works with no connection at all. Three things do need one, and each is started by a grown-up: reading aloud a word the app has never recorded, importing a list from a photo, and writing example sentences, which is a Plus feature. §09 sets out what each one sends, and to whom.

The free tier exists so you can judge the app on your own child before paying. We may adjust what it includes for future releases, but we will not retroactively remove access to content you have already paid for.

05 Little Orchid Plus, billing and cancellation

Little Orchid Plus starts with a 7-day free trial for eligible new subscribers, then becomes an auto-renewing subscription at $2.99 SGD per month. It unlocks the complete Primary 1–6 curriculum, the optional Higher Chinese characters, adjustable daily study limits, unlimited learner profiles and the parent progress view. In 我的听写表 · My spelling lists it raises the photo allowance to 100 pages a month, against 3 on the free tier, adds 自编例句 example sentences written for the words on your own list, and adds the 自动收起 sweep that files a list once its 听写日期 has passed.

• Who charges you. Google Play, not us. Google Play shows your trial eligibility and the $2.99 SGD monthly price before you confirm.
• When. For an eligible trial, the first charge is made after seven days. Otherwise, payment is charged when you confirm the purchase and again at the start of each renewal period.
• Renewal. It renews automatically each month until cancelled. Cancel before the trial or current billing period ends to avoid the next charge.
• How to cancel. In your Google Play subscription settings. We cannot cancel it for you, and uninstalling the app does not cancel it.
• After cancelling. Access continues until the end of the period you have paid for, then reverts to the free tier. Your learners and their progress remain on your device; only the locked content becomes unavailable.
• Restoring. Use “Restore purchases” in the app on any Android device signed in to the same Google Play account.
• Where. In-app purchase is available in the Android app. iOS is coming soon; the web build is study-only and cannot take payment.
• The photo allowance. 100 pages a month is an allowance, not a balance: it does not roll over, and it is counted by the calendar month. The app shows you the renewal date in your own local time. The connected features — photo import, 自编例句, and reading a custom word aloud — rely on outside companies, Microsoft and Google, whose services can be busy or down, so they are offered on a best-effort basis and are not part of what the subscription guarantees.

06 Refunds

Because Apple and Google process the payment, refunds are handled under their policies and requested through them — Apple's “Report a Problem” or Google Play's refund request flow. We do not hold your payment and cannot issue a refund directly. This does not affect any statutory rights you have as a consumer that cannot be excluded.

07 The curriculum — what it is and is not

Two different kinds of material sit in the app, and the distinction matters:

• The character lists are authoritative. Every card is a Singapore MOE 生字, taken verbatim from the official 《欢乐伙伴》 / 《欢乐伙伴 2.0》 lists — the 2024 syllabus for Primary 1–2 and the 2015 syllabus for Primary 3–6 — including each character's 识写 or 识读 classification.
• Everything built around them is enrichment. The teaching word for each character, the example sentence, the English translation and the pinyin annotation were generated and then checked, not published by MOE. The example sentences in particular were drafted by a computer and then validated — by automatic checks, and by human review that replaced 136 sentences and 518 teaching words. That process reduces errors; it does not eliminate them.

So: the app is a study companion, not a textbook and not an assessment tool. We do not warrant that the enrichment material is free of error, nor that it matches your school's sequence, your teacher's word choices or any particular examination. Where a lesson list for a term has not been confirmed, the app says so rather than inventing content.

Your child's textbook and teacher remain the final curriculum reference. If the app and the school disagree, follow the school, and please tell us so we can fix it.

Progress figures, memory-heat scores, badges and the orchid are motivational and diagnostic aids computed from your child's own practice. They are not a prediction of examination results.

08 No affiliation with MOE

Little Orchid is an independent product. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, approved by or connected to the Singapore Ministry of Education, any school, or the publishers of 《欢乐伙伴》. References to MOE syllabuses, character lists and textbook titles are factual references identifying the source of the character lists, made for the purposes of description and study. All trademarks and publication titles belong to their respective owners.

09 Optional connected and device features

The read-aloud speech check is optional, is off until a child taps it, and uses your phone's own speech recogniser. It may be unavailable, it may mishear, and — depending on your phone and its settings — it may send the sound to Apple or Google to be turned into words, under their terms. Read §07 of the Privacy Policy before enabling it. Its encouragement is never a substitute for a teacher's ear, and the app always offers honest self-assessment instead.

念出听写表 · Speaking a list aloud hands the microphone to that same recogniser on your phone, and carries the same caveat: the sound may be sent to Apple or Google, and what comes back may be wrong. The words it hears land in the editor for a grown-up to correct before a child sees them.

拍照导入 · Photo import sends the photograph to Google to be read into words. Reading characters off a photograph is imperfect — handwriting especially, printed 印刷 worksheets too — so every item arrives in the editor for a grown-up to review and correct before a child sees it, and a list read from a photo is labelled as such in the app. One credit is charged per page. A credit is given back only when the request never reached the service that reads it: you were offline, or the request was turned away because a fair-use limit had been reached. A page that is read, but read badly, still costs its credit.

自编例句 · Example sentences are written by Google's service. They are enrichment in exactly the sense of §07, not curriculum: your child's teacher and textbook remain the reference. It cannot change the words on your list — the app puts the sentences back against the list you saved — and if the request fails you lose the sentences, never the list.

Reading a custom word aloud. A word the app has never said before is sent to Microsoft's speech service to be read aloud, and the recording is then kept on your phone, so the same word never needs a connection twice. Saving a list fetches the missing recordings up front, which is how a list prepared on wifi still works on the day of the test, with no connection. With no connection and no recording yet on the phone, the word is silent and the app says so rather than pretending.

Fair use. There are fair-use limits on the connected features, set well above what a family needs, so the service stays affordable for us to run. When you reach one, the app tells you which limit it was and when it resets, rather than failing silently. We may change these limits.

Daily reminders are scheduled by your phone itself, and may not appear if your phone limits what apps may do in the background, or if you have not allowed the app to send notifications.

10 Your data and your backups

Learner data lives on your device and we hold no copy. That is a deliberate design choice with a consequence you should plan for: if you lose, reset or replace the device without exporting a backup, the progress cannot be recovered — not by you and not by us, because no copy of it exists anywhere else.

There is one exception, and it is not learner data. When the app reads a custom 听写 word aloud for the first time, the recording it gets back is kept in our store of recordings, filed under a scrambled code made from the word rather than the word itself, so we do not pay for the same word twice. The word is not stored, and the recording is not linked to you, to your copy of the app or to your child — but it is not deleted on a schedule either. The detail is in the Privacy Policy.

Export a backup from the Parent tab before changing devices, and keep the file somewhere private: it contains learner names and progress in readable form. Custom 听写 lists and their words are in the backup too. Restoring with “Replace everything” erases the learners currently on the device, which the app warns you about and names first. You are responsible for your own backups.

11 Availability and changes

The packaged curriculum keeps working without us: it is on the phone and asks nothing of our side. The connected features in §09 are not like that. They depend on a small service we run, and on Microsoft's and Google's services behind it, and we may change them, limit how much they can be used, or withdraw them. When they are unavailable the app falls back to working with no connection: the curriculum and its packaged recordings carry on, a custom word with no recording yet is silent, and photo import and example sentences are refused with a reason rather than left waiting.

We may also release updates that change, add or remove features, correct content, or adjust what the free tier includes. We may stop distributing the app or supporting a platform or operating-system version; if we do, copies already installed continue to work for as long as your device supports them, and you can still export your data.

We may update these terms. If a change is material we will raise the version and effective date at the top of this page and note it in the app's release notes. Continuing to use the app after a change takes effect means you accept the updated terms; if you do not, stop using the app and cancel any subscription.

12 Intellectual property

The app, its interface, artwork, the orchid illustrations, the written copy, the example sentences and translations, the compilation and arrangement of the curriculum pack, and the Little Orchid and 小兰华文 names and marks are owned by Little Orchid or licensed to it, and are protected by copyright and other laws. The MOE character lists themselves are not ours and are used as described in §07 and §08.

If you believe something in the app infringes your rights, write to [email protected] with enough detail to identify the material and we will investigate promptly.

13 Third-party content and licences

Little Orchid bundles work by others, and asks a few outside companies for help while it runs, with gratitude. These notices are part of these terms, and the licences below govern those components rather than this agreement. Where a row names a service rather than bundled code, it is used under that company's own terms and not under an open-source licence.

The app's Credits screen carries the complete, machine-generated list of open-source components and their licence texts as shipped in that build, which is authoritative if it differs from this summary.

14 Disclaimer of warranties

The app and this website are provided “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, whether express, implied or statutory, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, and accuracy or completeness of content.

In particular, and without limiting the above, we do not warrant that the app will be uninterrupted or error-free, that it will run on every device or operating-system version, that the enrichment content described in §07 is free of error, that it aligns with your school's teaching sequence, or that using it will produce any particular educational or examination outcome.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or of statutory consumer guarantees. Nothing in these terms excludes, restricts or modifies any right or remedy you have that cannot lawfully be excluded, and in that case the exclusions above apply only to the extent permitted.

15 Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for loss of profits, revenue, goodwill, opportunity, or educational outcomes, however caused.

We are also not liable for loss of learner data where you had not exported a backup, given that the app stores data only on your device and tells you so.

Where liability cannot be excluded, our total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to the app or these terms is limited to the greater of the amount you actually paid us or through a store for Little Orchid in the twelve months before the claim arose, or SGD 50.

Nothing in this section limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for any other liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

16 Termination

You may stop using the app at any time and uninstall it; that also deletes its local data, so export a backup first if you want to keep the progress. Cancel any subscription separately in your store settings.

We may suspend or terminate your licence if you materially breach these terms — in particular §03. Sections that by their nature should survive termination (§12 to §18) do so.

17 Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of Singapore, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. You and we submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Singapore.

If you are a consumer resident elsewhere, this does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory consumer-protection laws of your country of residence, or of the right to bring proceedings in your local courts where that right cannot be excluded.

Before starting formal proceedings, please write to us — most issues, especially content errors, are faster to fix than to litigate.

18 General

• Entire agreement. These terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us about the app, and replace any earlier understanding on the same subject.
• Severability. If a provision is held unenforceable, the rest stays in force and the unenforceable part is read down to the minimum extent necessary.
• No waiver. Not enforcing a right straight away is not a waiver of it.
• Assignment. You may not assign these terms without our consent. We may assign them in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of assets, provided your rights are not reduced.
• Third parties. Apple and Google are not parties to these terms and have no obligation to you under them; they are, however, entitled to enforce any store terms that apply to your purchase, and are intended beneficiaries of §03 and §14 to §15 to the extent their store rules require.
• Language. The English version of these terms governs.

19 Contact

[email protected] for anything about these terms, a content correction, or a licensing question. Privacy requests: [email protected].