In this update, we focused a lot on improving and reworking our way of dealing with Chinese characters. A lot of the work we did was behind the scenes, so you won’t be seeing a big part of the changes we’ve made. Don’t be jealous, you’ll soon be seeing the consequences and results of those background improvements! And not to worry, there’s still plenty to see in this update. Here are the changes and improvements what you can see in this update.

Waaaaay more Chinese words

Ninchanese used to be your fave Chinese learning tool, did you know it can now also be…. your go-to online dictionary? We’ve incorporated the whole CC-CEDICT database in Ninchanese for your viewing pleasure! That’s over 100, 000 Chinese characters and words you can now look up, explore and discover directly in the app.

As you can guess from this funny tweet, all sorts of words and names are now browsable in Ninchanese:

Tatatatat BATMAN ^^ 蝙蝠侠 – Biān fú xiá on @Ninchanese https://t.co/XvUzyMhRKK

— Jean-Remi (@JeanRemi_Laisne) 31 May 2016

More Chinese words to explore in Chinese meant more information to show you, so we seized this opportunity to improve the word pages for each character and word.

A detailed word page for each Chinese character and word (which you can share)

We reworked the way word pages worked to bring you more information on each word.  For a given word or Chinese character, say 猫, before the update, you could:

• Hear its pronunciation
• See its pinyin
• Read the character’s meaning(s)
• See its HSK level, when applicable
• See an animation of the stroke order
• See an example sentence for each of its meaning, when available
• Get information on the character’s composition: what components or elements is it made of?

Now, in addition to all that, when you look up a character, you can now also see:

• Simplified / Traditional form

Mandarin Chinese has two written forms: Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

Now, on each word page, you can see and switch between the two forms. It’s a first step towards the implementation of Traditional Chinese in Ninchanese!

• Compounds

Compounds are single characters that contain the character you looked up as one of their components. Here’s an example with the Chinese word 是 shì.  The character 提 tí , for instance, is a compound of 是 (where 扌 is the meaning component, providing a clue to the word’s meaning and 是 is the phonetic component – it’s a stretch, but tí sounds a little close to shì)

• Words that contain that character

Modern Chinese words are usually composed of more than one character so it’s always extremely interesting to see all the words that contain the character or characters you’re looking up.

For each single or multiple characters, you search for, you can now browse a list of the words that contain this character. This includes words that begin with the character you’re looking up and words that end with the character you’re looking up. Click on any of those words to see their definition in a separate page. Useful, no?

• Idioms

The Chinese language is well known for its idiomatic expressions, idioms, the most famous of all being its 4 character idioms, the 成语, chengyu. For each character or word you look up, we now show you the idioms that contain that character or word. Pretty cool way to discover new idioms, don’t you think?

Easily look up words

Say you want to look up a word in Chinese on Ninchanese?
Here’s a tip to easily look up new words: type app.ninchanese.com (also works on ninchanese.com) like you normally would, to access your Chinese learning app. You’ll see a new indication appear: 

Instead of pressing enter, hit “tab”.  This allows you to instantly look up a word on Ninchanese in your url bar and call up its word page directly. Nifty, don’t you think? Here’s a gif to show you exactly how it works:

Share the words you love

You can now also share each page on your favorite social network. You never know. Chinese is full of funny expressions and words. Maybe you’ll run into one you want to share with your pals? Or maybe you want to save it to one of your Pinterest boards for future reference? You can now do that and it’ll look like this:

What else is new?

In addition to adding a whole dictionary to Ninchanese and greatly improving our word pages, here are a few more notable changes you may want to know about.

Improving how we deal with polyphonic words

Did you know that some words in Chinese have multiple pronunciations and meanings, but look exactly the same? These characters are called polyphonic characters (literally, words with multiple pronunciations).

We used to show you the different pronunciations and meanings of a polyphonic character in the same word page.
Now there’s a page for each pronunciation and its assorted meanings and a link to its other pronunciations so you can learn each individually. They may look the same, but they are different characters after all. Like so:

Two things to know about learning polyphonic characters:

• There’s a chance you’ll need to be learning the new meanings and pronunciations as brand new words.
• When you’re reviewing the words you’ve learned, we’ll give you a hint as to which pinyin or meaning of the polyphonic character we’re asking you about; because otherwise, you have no way of knowing which word we’re asking you about!

More on typos

We’ve also made a few small improvements in the vocabulary stages:

– The typo detector now accepts tones entered as numbers: It used to reject number marks for tones, but it no longer does. Whoot!

– Hyphens? What hyphens? You can now type words with hyphens, with or without; we figure it was too mean to get an answer counted as wrong just because you didn’t use a hyphen properly. It’s a small step towards more flexibility in the answers we accept, let’s say.

These small but useful improvements conclude our round-up of the big, visible, changes brought about by this beta update.

Rest assured, there’s a lot more coming! Like I said in the beginning, this update is monumental. Monumental mainly in that it paves the way for a lot of things to come. You’ll see; there’ll be quite a few new big things added to Ninchanese in the coming weeks/ months; things like World 5 (for advanced Chinese learners, and HSK 5 takers), and traditional characters…

Sarah, a meowsome member of:

The Nincha Team

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The post More Chinese Words for Ninchanese appeared first on Ninchanese.

This week’s rather big update is all about your user experience learning Chinese. Thanks to your feedback, we’ve added a lot of new things in this update, including what we gave away in the title but not only! So now, you guys know what to do: experience the changes on Ninchanese and give us feedback! But first, you can read up on the improvements below.

In this week’s update, you’ll find:

A better responsive experience

We want you to be able to use Ninchanese everywhere: on your computer, on your tablet, on your phone… So making sure you can browse and use Ninchanese smoothly whatever the device you’re using is one of our priorities (I really want to use Ninchanese on my phone too!). Little by little, we’re working on improving the layout of Ninchanese on different screen resolutions. We’ve just redone some of the pages, such as the level selection screen where you choose what you’re going to do. Go on, give it a try, whip out your phone or resize the page. We guarantee it’ll look nice, whatever your screen (almost). Many more responsive improvements are coming in the next beta updates!

Improved display of the answers

Nincha put his paw down: No more displaying answers with definitions that were extremely long and tough to read, not to mention sometimes were cut-off in his vocab stages! Now, answers are displayed in a nice, numbered, orderly manner, so you can easily see what a word means, and get an idea of how many different meanings it has!

Sound plays automatically

You’ve been asking for this, and this beta update has listened. Now, when you get a word right in the vocab stages and in your reviews, it’ll play automatically! By hearing the sound more, you’ll be helping your brain make more associations and memorize the sound as well as the visual representation of the word. When you click on a block in the sentence building stage, you’ll also be able to hear the sound! Mewsic to your years, right?

A Meowsome Pop-up

You’re going to be friends with this pop-up

Perhaps this sounds familiar: you entered an answer, confident it was right, only to realize you gave the reading of the word in pinyin, rather than its meaning in English… Since the system was expecting English, your answer was counted as wrong. Well, good news, there is now a popup that gently lets you know that you entered the right word, but in the wrong language! You’ll therefore get a second chance to try again, albeit in the right language. We bet this was a major source of frustration for some. Now it’s gone. Sweet, no?
Naturally, if you get the answer wrong, no matter in what language, your answer will still be be counted as wrong.

A new help button with Nincha

Feeling a little confused about the word you just saw? Would like to have more information on it? Just hit help in the vocab stages and Nincha will take you straight to that word’s page, where you’ll be able to see the word’s stroke order, read example sentences, so you can understand how that word can be used and see how it behaves in context, and more!

Just hit Next!

Pick: go back to the selection screen or continue? You Clicked Continue? Skip selection. Go straight to the next stage. Don’t collect 20, 000. Uh, no, this is not Monopoly.  Still, we’ve added a new “next stage” button that’ll take you directly to the next stage without breaking your flow. Ain’t that cool? The next button is great when you want an uninterrupted study session in Mandarin Chinese!

New star system

As you learn words and get them right in your reviews, your memory level improves; this lets the Great Nincha Machine know you’re starting to know that word pretty well and can push back when it’ll show you the word again.
These stars were already visible in your word list, but we’ve decided to make them more visible: you can now see them in the vocab stages and in the reviews! They are an indicator of your progress and a better way to see where you are at in pushing that word in your long-term memory. We’re likely to be toying with these stars some more, so let us know what you think of them as they are now and if you see a need to improve them!

Unifying the structure

The whole structure of Ninchanese was redone and unified so that all stages work in a similar way (on our side at least) and have a unified design. It’s visually more pleasing, don’t you think? You might not see what changed that much, but believe us, it has, and these changes pave the way for a lot more, like the boss stages! Something to look forward in the near future

And a bunch more things in this beta update

In addition to all this, as usual, we’ve fixed a bunch of little stuff:

•  bug fixes: they’re spotted, they’re squashed.
• Word corrections: I corrected several words by adding some of your definition suggestions, fixing a typo here and there, and adding more example sentences. We also are gradually introducing British spelling for words, if you see any more that need British spelling, let us know in the feedback interface!
• Story fixes: there were a few typos to correct in the story, and sometimes Lupishu’s head wasn’t quite right…

These are little things we correct everyday as soon as we or you spot them, so if you see any such thing, you know what to do!

Before we stop rambling and let you go check out this beta update’s newest changes for yourself, one last word:
We hope you enjoy these improvements and they help you learn Chinese even better. Our commitment to bringing you an enjoyable and efficient Chinese learning experience is strong, so please, let us know what you like and don’t like, and what other features and improvements you’d like. As always, we’re looking forward to your feedback!

Enjoy learning Chinese!

The Nincha Team

With Ninchanese, enjoy learning everything you need to know to really speak Chinese! The web app is now in beta so sign up now to join the Ninchanese beta! Stay in touch with us on Facebook, Twitter, Google + and Pinterest and pre-order now to get access to the full beta!

The post The Automatic Sound, Stars and Awesome Popup Beta Update appeared first on Ninchanese.