Ninchanese
Ninchanese has gotten even more personalized. We’re happy to announce a fantastic new feature: the Nincha Decks! The Nincha Decks are your personalized word decks. You can now create your collections of Chinese characters and learn them whenever you want. Meowsome!
Choose your way to learn on Ninchanese.
On Ninchanese, you have access to a complete learning journey to take you to Chinese fluency. The learning content on that path is optimized for you, so you don’t have to worry about it and focus on learning Chinese. This way of learning is fantastic, but some of you told us they also wanted to learn their own vocabulary. They wanted to be able to take detours on their learning journey and learn vocabulary earlier or differently than in the courses.
That made a lot of sense, and that’s why we created the Nincha Decks! You are now more in control of what you are learning on Ninchanese. Follow the level-based learning path or create your own word lists – you decide.
Nincha Decks: Your Personalized Word Lists
What’s a Nincha deck? It’s a set of vocabulary, a list of words you can build and learn.
We created an easy way to make a clean list directly from the dictionary. The process is very simple and fast. You can make a deck in less than a minute! There are three short steps to create one:
- Go to your deck page,
- Create a new stage with a name and a description,
- Search for words in the dictionary, either in characters, English or pinyin,
and boom, start making up your deck!
You can create as many decks as you want, of up to 30 words, each with a minimum of 5 words.
Powered by SRS
Once your deck is built, you’ll learn words the same way you do in a vocabulary stage on Ninchanese. This means you’ll use the learning algorithm in the app, which is based on spaced repetition, to memorize them.
Then, the characters you’ve unlocked in your deck will be added to your global reviews. From time to time, you’ll need to review these words, just before you forget them. This ensures you keep everything fresh in your memory. With the SRS in Ninchanese, you make sure you never forget what you learn.
Like for a vocabulary stage, you can also do your reviews by deck only to focus your reviewing on that deck.
The Nincha Decks are clever
Do you know what’s cool? With the Nincha Decks, there is no risk of duplicates. So, for example, you can’t add a word twice to the same deck. There are also no risks of learning a new word more than once. If multiple decks contain the same words, you’ll only learn that word once. The same goes with words you’ve already learned on Ninchanese courses.
Don’t worry about managing words; our learning system will sort that out for you! Once you’ve unlocked a word, you won’t have to learn that word as a new word again, even if it’s in a different list or stage. You might have to review it, like all words, but that’s it!
In the same way, if a vocabulary stage in the Story Mode uses a word you’ve already learned in a deck, our system will know, and you won’t have to learn it again. Neat!
What are the possibilities with this new feature?
Learn the Chinese vocabulary you want, when you want. You decide! What if you want to learn numbers in Chinese, but you are 5 or 6 stages away from that in Ninchanese? Before, you had to wait until you got to the Chinese numbers stage. With the Nincha Decks, you get to choose when it’s the right time for you to learn something.
Create your own word deck of Numbers and get learning! That’s what the decks are for.
Create decks of the words you learn in class
What if you are in a Chinese class or have a tutor giving you new words to learn regularly? Quite frankly, from my personal experience, we were given 20 characters to learn every two days in class. It was pretty hard to follow my memorization of these characters. I mean, how did I know I knew these words? Besides, it was troublesome to have my book and pen ready to learn them.
Now, with the Nincha Decks, you can easily save the words you see in class. Better yet, you can review them efficiently! A purrfect way to learn words in priority. Plus, you’ll be sure to always have the Decks in your pocket, and you’ll benefit from the memorization algorithm in Ninchanese to learn them. With the Nincha Decks, remembering the words you see in class will be easy!
A super handy tool for you learners
Not only can you now create your own word decks, but you can also now create decks with different purposes! Imagine the possibilities. I can think of many ways to use them. For instance, if some characters have trouble sticking in your memory. Now, you can copy them in a deck and strongly focus on these characters. A deck could also be composed of 20 characters you want to focus on, like question words. Or the interaction words or expressions you’d like to use when speaking.
Focus on the words you want
What if you want to learn a very specific/professional vocabulary?
There are not many courses available for very specific vocabulary needs in Chinese or costly ones. I was discussing that with someone working in health insurance yesterday.
With the Nincha Decks, you can now create whatever word list you find useful! Problem solved. Focus on industry-specific vocabulary as much as you want! Everyone with their particular needs will be able to use Ninchanese completely. We help you reach fluency in Chinese with our courses, and you also have a way to specialize your Chinese.
Save unknown characters you encounter
We like to browse the Internet in Chinese, read books or manhua, watch videos in Chinese, and always encounter new characters we want to learn. Now with the Nincha decks, you’ll be able to add them to a deck and learn them. Then, next time you meet that word in a text or a video, you’ll understand it without difficulty. Isn’t that great?
Maybe you’ll pick up a word repeatedly said in a Chinese Drama and want to learn it. Perhaps you saw one of our tweets and wanted to learn that word, for example, cryptocurrency. Now you can! Just start a new deck and add words to it as you encounter them. Then, use the handy look-up tool to find any unknown word in the dictionary and add it to your deck.
Track your Progress
You can easily follow your progress learning words in a deck. As you unlock words in the deck, you’ll see your completion percentage. Then, you can see your memory level for each character on the deck page. The yellow stars tell you how well you know a word.
Manage your decks and words
Once the deck is created, you can change the title and the description of your deck. You can also manage the words in a deck and remove those you don’t want to learn anymore. You can also add more words to a deck whenever you want. You can add up to 30 words to a single deck. And lastly, if you don’t want a deck anymore, you can delete it.
Some other new updates:
The Nincha Decks are the biggest chunk of this update, but there are also a couple of other improvements.
- You can now skip the story if you want. That’s very nice when you reset your account to restart your learning and don’t want to re-read the stories again.
- The sound for some words was improved, and we improved how we handled the sound behind the scenes.
- The dictionary’s search results have gotten better. The search algorithm has been improved to see more characters shown in better order.
When learning a language, there are lots of content we want to access but can’t yet, and there’s no certain path for that. Having the Nincha deck along with your learning will directly benefit your learning.
We know Ninchanese has helped many Nincha members make meowsome progress in their Chinese. We hope these new features we discussed together will help you learn Chinese even better.
Many of you had been asking for this new feature so enjoy! And if you’re not a Premium member yet, upgrade now and help us bring even more features to Ninchanese.
We hope you enjoy these updates! We love to hear your thoughts and will be happy to discuss them by email.
