World 5 (HSK 5) – Part 2 is out of Beta!

Join Lupishu and Nincha through +100 new stages of advanced academic content to learn Chinese! You’ll be delighted to learn Chinese with these new stages full of HSK 5 vocabulary, upper intermediate to advanced Chinese grammar, and dialogues. It’s time to depart from the eternal intermediate level and move to a fluent Chinese speaker level!

Explore this new island of learning on Ninchanese here.

Why most Chinese learners stay at intermediate levels

It’s not their fault. It’s hard to find a teacher that has the experience to drive them well in their learning at this point. There’s also not much interesting content available for Chinese learners once they are at an upper intermediate level and want to brush past it. And, to give a final blow: the books weigh a ton and look impossible to go through.

They could use something to guide them further in their learning and help them take the next step. They’re ready for it.

A new world 5 to help you cross the bridge to HSK 5 advanced Chinese

At Ninchanese, we bite-sized all HSK 5 needs into small, efficient, and well-thought-out stages. You now have access to a complete world that will effectively help you improve each part of the Chinese language you need to be at ease in. That’s reading, writing, listening, and speaking.

This new advanced HSK 5 Chinese world offers structured learning perfect to support all the learning you’ve been doing up to now and all the freeform learning you’ve done in context.  The best part? Learn however you like, do a session of 5 minutes a day or however much more you want, and feel a recurring sense of achievement and progress.

Ninchanese is an incredible app for learning Chinese!

” I actually graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a MA in Chinese.
I’ve used Ninchanese daily, and it has helped me a lot!  “

 – Connor, Ninchanese User

Try Ninchanese, an award-winning method to learn Chinese today:

Start Learning Now

What does it mean to have an “advanced level of Chinese”?

Wondering if this new advanced level of Chinese is for you? If you’re ready? We bet you are. If you see yourself in this, you sure are:

You have made great strides in their Chinese learning up to now. You are good at talking about common topics and are learning a lot on your own, by interacting with a Chinese environment. This has helped you realize there’s still a lot you want to learn.

Does it mean you’re looking for a lot of interesting and authentic content to learn?

That’s a good thing, because the new World 5 in Ninchanese is huge and full of cool content.

To give you an idea: Now that it’s complete, the HSK5 world is as BIG as world 1 to 4 reunited! That’s a good chunk of content to work on!

HSK 5 World 5: Advanced content on two islands

The complete World 5 is so big it had to be split into two islands. Once you’ve done both, you’ll have learned 1 300 Chinese words and over 60 of the more difficult and advanced grammar structures. And that’s not it! You’ll also learn by speaking and writing over 70 new dialogues and 1523 new sentences to be able to speak about advanced ideas.

You’ll be able to read newspapers and magazines, enjoy Chinese films and plays and give a full-length speech in Chinese. Discover the curriculum of the HSK world 5 here.

Vocabulary

The amount of HSK 5 vocabulary to learn and familiarize yourself with is much larger than in the previous worlds. Organized by theme, this vocab will give the keys to understand much of any given situation. You’ll be able to understand the words used in any TV show or newspapers for example.

Grammar

The HSK 5 grammar you’ll study in this world goes in depth. All lessons are still simply explained but you’ll be handling more complex structures here. Not to worry, you’ll have plenty of example sentences to rely on. They are relevant, all full of sense. Learn to use the grammar points and example sentences in the grammar stages, and you’ll be able to use very useful ways to express your thoughts in Chinese.

Dialogues

As always, the HSK 5 dialogues all have a very practical focus and day to day related events. The conversations are also much longer than in the previous worlds. You’ll get a sense of immersion through the interactive way of speaking.

Authentic Chinese material that stays interesting

Too often, content at an advanced Chinese level goes abstract and borderline stuffy, when there are loads of interesting topics to talk and learn about! Modern, day-to-day content, to talk about technology, the news, economics, your favorite artist, to debate and share your opinion, to understand the culture and social etiquette, and a lot more. One area this world particularly focuses on is working in a Chinese environment and doing International business. Those are key things to know to pass the HSK 5.

Learn to work in a Chinese environment: a highlight on one key topic in World 5

As you go through the thousands of dialogues in the app, you’ll see Lupishu evolve and learning working skills. Lupishu is going through every stage of the work market and so will you alongside him. From making a Chinese resume, explaining skills in an interview, starting with an internship at a coffee shop at the airport, to become a salesman for a big company,… Yes, our Lupishu has well grown. We are very proud of Lupishu. And of you, now already, and even more so when you’ll reach his level and you’ll be able to work in a Chinese environment at ease!

What’s else is in store for this new HSK 5 world?

What about the pearl?

The story, of course! Lupishu is still doing his best to recover the pearl from the Emperor! IceAly, one of our early users, loves Ninchanese tremendously and asked to help write the story. IceAly is very creative, lives in China and use daily Ninchanese. We gladly accepted her help to write the story. We are impatient to share this new cat-story full of epic Chinese adventures with you!

Final words

Creating this new world based on the Ninchanese method has been a tremendous and fulfilling amount of work. We greatly thank all the Chinese teachers that poured their hearts into it, and the many little Nincha dragons that beta-tested it and sent their corrections (Noornalini, a special mention to you). Thanks also to all the Nincha team for their excellent work. We hope you’ll love it.

True, we are cute, true we are fun, true we have cats. But very true, that you have access to great educational content is our top priority.

We want to thank all that have helped to make Ninchanese so meowsome.

The Nincha Team

Stay in touch with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Try the best way to learn Chinese today.
Ninchanese is free to use!

Sign up now

PS: Help us spread the word about Ninchanese. Share the Ninchanese adventure with your Chinese learner pals and help the Chinese learning community know about us ;)! And if you like Ninchanese, subscribe to support your meowsome Chinese learning app!

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 Oh look! A typo!

Are you the type to type really fast when you’re doing your reviews and to press enter with one hand before your other hand is done typing? Or perhaps you’re an ardent multitasker with a penchant for multiple tabs and one-hand typing? If any of that sounds familiar — or if you’re just really prone to making typing mistake — boy are you going to love the new typo detector on Ninchanese! It now gives you a second chance to correct your answer, both when you’re entering the meaning or the pronunciation, so you don’t get your answer wrong due to a silly typing mistake!

So far, the reactions we’ve gotten have been overwhelmingly positive and along the tunes of “Wow! Typo Detector! Awesome” and “Typo detection! Yay!!!” What’s yours going to be?
My suggestion: go give it a try right now and see how many times in one review session you get saved by the typo detector. I personally stopped counting :). The typo detector is now active in the Vocab stages with Nincha and in your reviews.

The typo detector will make each review milestone easier to finish, but if your reviews feel easier now, the typo detector is not the only thing to thank.

Reviews are now a walk in the park(almost)

See, a number of you voiced issues they had with the reviews, which got the Nincha Team thinking about improving how the review system works work; revising the difficulty settings and how we handle mistakes in a review session.

A more even mix of words

First up: showing you a more even distribution of hard (for you) and easier words to review.

The way the previous words were distributed placed a heavier emphasis on newly learned — or relearned words. We therefore worked on balancing that out; and aimed at turning your review session into a walk in the park. Well, a walk in a park with a few steep hills to climb now and then. Not all your words can be easy to review, or they wouldn’t still be in your review queue.

Mat, our head developer, therefore spent days his head burrowed in charts, pouring through data to establish what could be considered as “hard” and plotting a better distribution graph using us and himself as his first test subjects.

The Great Nincha Machine now takes into account several things when presenting words to review to you such as how well or little you know that word; if you’re reviewing on time or not to serve you up more balanced reviews. That way, during your reviews, you’ll see an even mix of words you’re less familiar and more comfortable with.

In short: This should make doing your reviews less like a tall mountain to climb and more of a pleasant ride with a few hikes and breaks along it.  What do you think of the changes?  That’s not all that’s been changed in the reviews!

Dealing more gradually with mistakes

Another pet-peeve your learners have mentioned is the way the Great Nincha Machine dealt with your mistakes, brutally downgrading you to zero stars, regardless of whether you’d actually forgotten the word or had just made a typo.

Well, the typo part has now been taken care of, so that shouldn’t be a problem anymore. In addition, our Great Nincha Machine now does its best to distinguish between words you’ve completely and entirely forgotten and those which have temporarily slipped your mind.  Each word you get wrong therefore now gets assessed to see if it needs to be shown to you again the next day, or if it can wait a few days to be reshown to you.

This should make our handling of mistakes a lot more flexible and, in the long term, mean you have less reviews coming back every day.
In short: no more seeing a word you got wrong in your reviews the next day, unless you really really can’t remember a thing about it!

There’s more planned

There are quite a few more improvements planned in the review department so expect more changes in the near future. We’re starting with these changes and are waiting for you to show us how you like them. We’re monitoring the reviews closely to make sure the Great Nincha Machine is behaving like it should and dealing with your reviews in the best way for you.

So please,  go do your reviews and tell us what you think of the new improved reviews! Tell us: What do you think of the words you’re seeing? Do you feel you’re seeing a more even mix of hard and not-so hard words for you? Do your reviews feel more like a walk in the park? Do the changes suit you?

Hello, tooltips!

Perhaps you’ve noticed these nice white boxes popping up everywhere, with Nincha, Baimei and Yocha telling you things? Your teachers and coaches were eager to help you out so we listened to their wishes. They added little tutorials that now appear the first time you perform certain action on Ninchanese to guide you and show you where everything is. How do you like being taken care like that? It makes first times easier, don’t you think?

More seasoned Nincha Learners also get to see the tutorials, but they can easily be skipped by clicking on the check mark. And who knows, there might be things you’ll be discovering to. Can you look me in the eye and tell me you know what ALL the bonuses do, for instance? Well, now you can: just read Nincha’s messages to you!

The Nincha Team’s favorite sport: Bug squash

As always, a few bugs were also squashed in this beta update. Our goal is for you to have a great, unhindered, Chinese learning experience and bugs don’t factor in well with that.

No more drunk PY/ EN indicator

Drinking on the job is a big no-no and our PY/EN indicator should have known that. It didn’t though, and some of you poor learners ran into it under the influence. It asked you to enter English, only to tell you that it wanted Pinyin, didn’t it? Or the opposite? It must have been a confusing period for you!

Guess what we learned? That the PY/EN indicator AND Chrome were drinking together and conspiring to bring you those confusing results. Good news, though, they’ve both entered an online self-paced AA program and are well on track to recovery.
In short: the PY/EN indicator will now show you nothing but the truth. It swears.

(p.s: we’re counting on you to report it if it starts hitting the bottle again)

See ALL 3 words when you start a new vocab stage

Some of you users only saw two instead of three words at the beginning of a stage; this won’t happen again.

These are the big changes in this week’s beta update! Do you like the improvements? Let us know in the comments or share your feelings by tagging us @ninchanese on Twitter!

Sarah and

The Nincha Team

Stay in touch with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Try the best way to learn Chinese today.
Ninchanese is free to use!

Sign up now

The post The beta update that makes you go “oh no a typo” and then “oh yeah” appeared first on Ninchanese.

A big step for Nincha and Lupishu

After being a little over a year in private beta, Ninchanese, the gamified Chinese learning application, is now open to all! Ninchanese’s open beta is a huge step for Nincha and Lupishu and great news for Chinese learners around the world.

Reflecting back at everything the Nincha Team has accomplished so far with Ninchanese, two things become clear:

• We’ve come a long way from the initial Ninchanese idea and design (which originally, only covered vocabulary)

One of the very first wireframes for Ninchanese

• All this wouldn’t have happened without the help of our amazing and incredible beta testers and users. So, thank you all! Without the thousands of feedback messages sent by our beta testers, their encouragements and their showings of love for the Chinese application we were building, the Nincha Team would never be where we are today. They helped us improve the application tremendously, helped us run a successful Kickstarter campaign, and some became our first customers… We’re incredibly grateful to all of our closed beta users and for their wonderful support. You’ll always hold a special place in our hearts, Nincha learners.

What Ninchanese being in open beta means

Ninchanese in open beta means a few big changes for the application, which we’ll cover here.

Ninchanese is now freemium

Now that the app is in open beta, Ninchanese is a freemium web application. This means it’s free to use and you can easily upgrade to paid plans to get access to more features and content. For instance, all the vocabulary stages on Ninchanese are completely free, so you can easily learn all the vocabulary you need to strike conversations with Chinese native speakers, read books or take HSK tests, from level 1 to 6. To take your learning further, build sentences, work on your Chinese pronunciation and listening skills, you’ll need to subscribe.

P is for Premium

This is not the only change the open beta brings. The open beta also means: access to more content!

Access to more great content!

Four worlds to access on Ninchanese’s open beta!

The closed beta was restricted to World 1, which offered beginner (newbie) Chinese learning content. More advanced content was available, but only for those who preordered. Ninchanese going out of closed beta changes that: all four worlds are now accessible. You can therefore now easily jump to content more your level, if 你好 and introducing yourself are things you can now say in your sleep.

What else is new?

Easily accessible to everyone!

From now on, no more invites are required to enter Nincha’s fantastic world. Everyone can register on its own. So, new learners, rejoice: you can start learning Chinese on Ninchanese in a just a few clicks. Not sure how to get started? Check out our Get started page!

A new face for Ninchanese

We’re so happy to be unveiling Ninchanese’s new site!  To celebrate moving Ninchanese to open beta, we’ve also completely redesigned ninchanese.com. The site’s all-new design resembles Ninchanese, the app, a lot more than the previous one! So, dear readers, now that Ninchanese.com has shed its skin, head here to see Ninchanese’s true face.

The new Ninchanese.com site also offers plenty of resources on learning Chinese and using Ninchanese. There’s a help section, guides on how to get started in Chinese, and a lot more to explore!

More to come

In short here, in Nincha Land, we’re very proud of reaching this step and releasing Ninchanese in open beta today.

We have a lot more in store, and plenty of surprises planned, to continue on our mission of bringing Chinese learners everywhere the most adorable and efficient way to learn Chinese. So, you can count on us to continue to innovate and improve Ninchanese and we look forward to reaching lots more steps with you guys!

Have you tried Ninchanese’s beta yet? Come on over and give it a try! Show your Chinese learning friends the new website and invite them to join you in the beta!

Sarah and

The Nincha Team

Stay in touch with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Try the best way to learn Chinese today.
Ninchanese is free to use!

Sign up now

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World 4? What’s in it?

Get ready to take your Chinese to the next level with this whole new content! But be prepared, World 4 means business. It has twice as much new content as World 3: that means double the amount of new words in Chinese to learn, and over a thousand new Chinese sentences to build and say!

Who’s it for?

Are you at an intermediate level of Chinese and are looking for content that will take your Chinese to the next level? World 4 is perfect for you!

Are you learning with us in the app? Nincha learners, World 4 is the next logical step once you’ve finished World 3.

With close to 900 new words in Mandarin Chinese to learn, and nearly twice as many sentences to learn to build and say so you learn the words in context, this world will give you all the background you need to really foray into the Chinese speaking world. From the grammar structures and patterns you’ll be learning to the vocabulary you’ll be acquiring, to the themes the speaking stages cover, World 4 will equip you for China.

By the time you finish World 4, you’ll have learned over 1600 words; not bad! You’ll be able to read a modern Chinese text, a short novel or watch a Chinese or Taiwanese drama and understand most of it. You’ll be able to use the most common Chinese syntax patterns and therefore won’t be thrown off when conversing with natives by sentence structures you’ve never heard of. In short, with this new content, you’ll be ready to jump off the deep end and go live in a Chinese-speaking place! Sounds pretty meowsome, don’t you think?

What will I be learning to talk about?

World 4’s stages focus on learning useful and practical vocabulary to live, travel and work in China. These are some of the topics you’ll be learning to talk about in World 4: Rock on, tiger!

-Traveling in China: learn to confidently face any travel situation (Taxi – Bus – Train – Plane) in Chinese with World 4’s speaking stages. Yes, you will travel all over Ninchana!

– Thinking of looking for a job in China? Baimei is too and discusses job searching and interview strategies in Mandarin Chinese.

– Bargaining: Bargaining is a must in China and in Ninchana alike, and Lupishu’s learning all the bargain tips and tricks to get the best deal in Chinese.

– Going out: Life’s not all about work and shopping and Nincha’s determined to show Lupishu that.

– and plenty more to discover! This is the biggest update to date in Ninchanese and we hope you’ll love it.

How do I get access?

World 4 will be available in early access starting this Monday. To get access, you need to be part of the Ninchanese Beta and to have either: supported us on Kickstarter (backers with Yocha packs and up get access) or to pre-order.

We hope you have fun and enjoy all the new Chinese content you’ll learn!

We’re counting on you to tell us what you think of the stages, and to give us feedback on this world!

The Nincha Team

Stay in touch with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Try the best way to learn Chinese today.
Ninchanese is free to use!

Sign up now

The post Ready for some serious Chinese learning? World 4 is here! appeared first on Ninchanese.

New sounds and a new Chinese voice

Ninchanese has a new voice! What’s going on? We’ve replaced our previous sounds by new sounds!  This new text-to-speech voice is female but has a softer tone than the previous one. It also sounds less robotic and, well, more Chinese. Also, these new sounds give us more flexibility and options, so expect a few surprises and added options down the line…

We’re all holding our breath until we know what what you think of this new voice! So, go check the new sounds out and tell us what you think of them, purrty please? Are you happier with these? We personally especially dig how she now says Lupishu!

A much better word page

Are you familiar with the word pages on Ninchanese? They are our Chinese words’ homes and where you can go visit them when you went to know more about them: Each word’s page includes example sentences, an animation of the stroke order, character decomposition, related words. It’s a good way to learn more about a word in Mandarin and see how it is used in context.

New Chinese character stroke animations

If you’ve been on a Chinese word’s page before, then perhaps you’re familiar with the first character stroke order animations we had. They were a little spotty, jumpy, giphy, to say the least. They weren’t perfect but they were a start to show you the order a character is drawn in and something to improve. Well, we now have some good news for you: you can now enjoy new, improved, character stroke order animations!

These new stroke order animations are entirely home-made and are a wonderful fresh departure from what we had before. The animations now smoothly retrace the order of each character so you can easily see how a character is drawn and in what order. They are also entirely at your command: want to see the stroke order again? Click and see it start up again. No more waiting for the gif to return to its initial state. Nice, no?  Perfect if you want to practice handwriting the words you’re learning with us!

Get lost exploring how characters are made

That’s not the only improvement we’ve made to the word page: you can now have fun exploring how Chinese characters are made in the character decomposition section!

In this section, each character is broken down into the different components that make it up. You can now hover over the character components that are in our database to hear how they sound and click them to learn more about those components.

Our database doesn’t have all the character components stored yet, so we’ll be progressively adding them and improving this section.  As it is, it’s already a  great way to explore different character components and see how a given character is linked to others. I spent 15 minutes just clicking away and seeing how this bit became part of this character and how that bit ended up here… A first of many sessions as I find this fascinating and I think you will too!

See when a character has multiple pronunciations

Did you know that over 10% of Chinese characters are two or more pronunciations? We’ve started reworking how we handled Chinese characters to better reflect that in Ninchanese. The first step we’ve taken is show you in the word page the other pronunciations a Chinese word can have, and hence, its additional meanings. This is very much still a work in progress, but we thought you’d like to know :).

User experience ajdustements

No beta update wouldn’t be complete without a few adjustments made to your Chinese learning experience, as our goal is to make as smooth and pleasant as possible.

A try again button

Not feeling satisfied with your performance in the speaking stages? You can now hit the “try again” button and get a redo to improve your score. It feels good, you should try!

More balanced scores

Had you noticed the changes in the scoring system? Previously, you could score big in a dialogue exercise even if you were being lazy — and could game your way to the top of the leaderboard by repeatedly doing dialogues. And sadly, no matter how hard or well you performed in the sentence-building stages, you just couldn’t get a good score. A few changes were made to how the scores work for these two types of stages so the points you get in each are more balanced out. More adjustements will be made in the future, but it’s a step in the right direction!

Bug fixing

We also dedicated time to removing, as always, bugs and issues you report, such as:

• When you finish a vocab exercise, you no longer see “Awesome you finished all your reviews”!
• As many of you pointed out, a review session alway ended with the wrong sound. This has now been fixed and you can end your review session on the right note! Yay, right?
• And more typos were removed, corrections and improvements were brought to definitions, thanks to your wonderful suggestions and remarks.

We hope you enjoy these new changes! Let us know what you think of them and what else you want to see added or improved on Ninchanese to create the best Chinese learning experience we can bring you.

The post Voice and stroke order animation update appeared first on Ninchanese.

What’s in World 3 – Intermediate level?

In World 3, you’ll be getting access to 50 new stages  to take you from an elementary to an upper-elementary and intermediate level in Chinese.

Lots of new Chinese content to learn

You’ll be learning over 300 new words with Nincha, 400 new sentences, and close to 20 new grammar lessons!

You’ll learn to use more key sentence structures in spoken and written Chinese :Once you’re done with world 3, notions like how to use the particle 把, using the change of state 了, knowing when to use 才 and 就, using the pattern “是…的” and more, will have no secrets for you!

World 3 continues on from World 2, so you’ll be also learning new material and to expand on the content you’ve previously  learned to be able to talk about a larger variety of topics. You’ll become a pro in Mandarin Chinese at topics like negotiating, shopping, banking, and a lot more!

More of the story to discover!

In World 3, you’ll also be unlocking part 3 of the story, as Nincha and Lupishu explore the Country of Water. You’ll discover Lupishu’s new look and color because as you progress, Lupishu grows too!

How do I get access?

World 3 is currently available in Early Access. World 3 can be accessed by all our Kickstarter backers that got a Baimei Pack and up,  and to all the lovely people who have pre-ordered Ninchanese since the Kickstarter campaign has ended.

• If that sounds like you, you should already have access to World 3. Simply log in to your account on http://app.ninchanese.com and get started!

You should be seeing these badges in your profile:

Contact us if that’s not the case!

Don’t have access yet? Do you want to unlock this new content? Here’s how:

• Pre-orders are available for a limited time only, so now’s your chance to get early access to Worlds 1, 2 and 3 and the other soon to be released worlds!

Have fun!

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

The post World 3 is out – Intermediate level now available appeared first on Ninchanese.

 Upper-elementary content, here you come!

Releasing World 2 is an exciting step for us and for you Nincha learners. We’re psyched to be offering higher- level content in Mandarin Chinese on Ninchanese!

In World 2, 30+ new stages are waiting for you.  These new stages will take you from an elementary level in Chinese to upper-elementary. Meowsome, right? That’s over 200 more words and over 250 new sentences to learn. You’ll also be unlocking Part of 2 of Nincha and Lupishu’s story and help Lupishu grow.

Meowsome! How do I get access?

World 2 is currently available in early access. There are two ways to get access to world 2:

You’re one of our Kickstarter backers

If you got the Lupishu pack and above during our successful Kickstarter campaign, excellent choice. You automatically get access to World 2. Just log in to your Ninchanese account and start learning! (if you didn’t get access, contact us)

You can even exceptionally skip ahead to the first stage of World 2 without finishing World 1 if you can’t wait. (Or if World 2 is more your speed, level- wise).

You can pre-order Ninchanese

If you’re not a Kickstarter backer, you can still pre-order Ninchanese for a limited time and get early access to World 2, and the other upcoming worlds when they come out. By pre-ordering Ninchanese, you also get a one-year subscription plan when Ninchanese launches.

In both cases, we’re counting on you to have fun doing World 2 and learning new things in Chinese, and to give us feedback to make World 2 purrfect when it goes public!

It’s just a start

There are six worlds in Ninchanese, and now that we’re on a roll, we’re not stopping. World 3 is coming soon, so stay tuned!

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

The post World 2 is here! appeared first on Ninchanese.

Part 1 of the update: Improving your user experience

We pride ourselves on offering you wonderful learners a pleasant and intuitive way to learn Chinese on Ninchanese. In that regards, there are plenty of things we can improve and add to the beta to make your experience learning Chinese as smooth and enjoyable as possible. This is what we worked on:

See more clearly when you get something wrong

We’ve added a little nudge so you can notice better when you’re getting an answer wrong in the vocab stages. What do you think? Sometimes, it’s the little things that make the most difference.

Easier navigation in the app

We’ve added a handy little “next stage” button so you can easily navigate from one stage to the next without having to go back to the home screen each time. It makes moving from Nincha’s vocabulary stages to Yocha’s sentence-building stages to Baimei’s Speaking Stages a breeze. Give it a try!

A change to how our feedback system works

The feedback system has changed! Don’t worry, it remains as easy as ever to use; simply hit the feedback button on the left hand of the screen to send us a feedback message! We love getting feedback from you
What has changed is where your feedback messages go — and where you see the replies. Now, everything is neatly stored in the application, so you’ll simply need to log on to Ninchanese to see if your message was answered.

You can also access the different feedback messages you’ve left and the answers we’ve written to your feedback by going to the Feedback section directly. Enjoy!

Goodbye bugs!

We’ve also squashed a few bugs in Ninchanese:

• Your result screen in Ninchallenges now shows your real usernames, and doesn’t say “Sarah” anymore. Better, right? You can also click on your Ninchallengers’ name
• The notification email will no longer tell you your world rank is #O. We’re sorry about that, we didn’t mean to shame you or anything; it was just a glitch.
• No more 404 errors in the time attacks when you click on “back to selection”; you can navigate time attacks and their leaderboards easily, now!
• And all more little ones, not even worth mentioning anymore now that they’re gone

There’s more coming

A big chunk of our work has also been dedicated to getting Ninchanese ready to give you access to more content – and we’re almost there! Pretty soon, we’ll be giving our users access to worlds 2 and up; it’ll be an exciting step for Ninchanese and our Nincha learners! Our Kickstarter backers are the first to get early access to these worlds (and so can you, by pre-ordering Ninchanese now) and then the worlds will be accessible to our beta users. This will be happening end of October, so get ready for new stages to unlock!

The Nincha Team

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What? When? Where?

The campaign goes live today at 11 am New York Time. We hope to see you there!

Head here to check out the campaign

We put together this Kickstarter campaign because we can’t do it without you. We need your help to allow Ninchanese to truly become the awesome Chinese learning app we know it can be. We need your support!

Why Kickstarter?

Ninchanese is a passion project for us. Jean-Rémi and I (Sarah) started working on Ninchanese three years ago. Now, we’re a small 3 person team – with Mathieu who jumped aboard last year – and we’re proud of what we’ve self-funded and achieved so far with Ninchanese.

We believe Ninchanese has great potential as a Chinese learning tool for Chinese learners everywhere. As you know, Ninchanese is now in beta (if you want an invite, sign up on Ninchanese.com!).

We would love to make Ninchanese accessible to everyone. Everyone deserves a chance to learn Chinese in a fun and cute environment! This is what led us to Kickstarter. We need your help us finish what we’ve started and take it even further. Help make Ninchanese purrrfect!

Support us

A Kickstarter is all or nothing: if we don’t reach our goal, we don’t get anything! It would mean the world to us if you could support us. How? By backing the project Ninchanese and helping spread the word.

We want to send a strong positive signal to show everyone the campaign has taken off and to inspire them to join. Please help us do that!

In short:

You want to know what happens next to Lupishu and Nincha in their adventure accross Ninchana? You want Ninchanese to keep growing? We do too! Kickstarter is the best way to get Ninchanese there!

So if you want to help, read no more and go to Kickstarter!

See you there!

A very excited Nincha Team

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Ninchanese combines addictive game mechanics, cute cats and efficient Chinese learning techniques to make learning Chinese a lot of fun! Now live on Kickstarter! The app is now in beta so sign up now for early access to the beta! Check out our trailer and stay in touch with us on Facebook, Twitter, Google + and Pinterest.

The post Ninchanese on Kickstarter appeared first on Ninchanese.

Improved Vocabulary learning

Some of you Nincha Learners had complained about the repetitive aspect of unlocking new words to learn new vocabulary. Well, guess what? It’s been improved. Dramatically improved.

The way you unlock words is now super personal to you.

We’ve carefully taken apart our learning algorithm – which is based on the Spaced Repetition System by the way. We tell you all about the SRS here – and put it back together in a way that will make your vocabulary learning a lot smoother.

Know that word already really well? The Great Nincha Machine will notice that and quickly move on to the next word to learn.
Having a little trouble memorizing this word? Our Cat-in-the Machine system will give you a little more time with that word, to ensure you fully get acquainted with it.

Ain’t that cool? The Great Nincha Machine now fully adapts to your learning speed and to your memorization skills, so the way you learn new words corresponds exactly to you.
Your needs, your speed. You’re the one learning so that’s only normal.

Waaaaayyy better reviews

A few of you Nincha Learners wrote to me to share their sorrow in having a seemingly endless number of reviews to do each day and no relief in sight. I felt their pain. Our learning system worked but it just wasn’t good enough yet.
Well, this is all in the past, now. Thanks to the Beta, and your numerous feedback, we carefully looked and analysed the data to see where we could improve the system. The Great Nincha Machine’s review system has been completely overhauled and boy, does it rock now!

Now, you review a mix of words you’ve learned. Sometimes it’ll be easy and sometimes it won’t be as easy. Just to keep you on your toes. Don’t worry, though you won’t stay stuck – quite the opposite in fact! The whole process of reviewing the words you’ve learned is now wayyy better and you won’t see your reviews fly by.

Memory levels

Learning vocabulary is all fine and dandy but how do you know whether you really know something? By taking those words out for a spin of course.

Before you do, how about checking if you know that word a little, a lot or really really well? That’s what our new memory level stars are for. They’ll show you where you’re at when learning a word. And if you haven’t practiced this word in a while and it’s starting to slip your memory, your stars will decrease to reflect that.

Ooooh 4 and 5 stars!

Your goal now is to get each word up to 5 stars; which’ll show that you know that word really well. Don’t you love stars? I do. And there’s nothing I love more than keeping them topped up.

My Ninchanese review routine is now the following:

1. Do my reviews. 152 to do today. Woot! They’ll be finished in no time.
2. Play my Ninchallenges. I’ve reviewed all the words I needed, so I’m all revved up to play.
3. Look at the leaderboard: not that I’m gloating, but being in the top 3 is meowsomely pleasant.
4. Browse the words I’ve unlocked and stare at all my beautiful stars. It’s so satisfying to get 5 stars out of 5.
5. Do a cycle of 3 stages: vocabulary, grammar and speaking.

More changes

These changes are not related to vocab learning but here are a few other things we’ve improved:

• Yocha is now the one teaching you how to build sentences  and Baimei the one you’ll purr in Chinese with – Nincha tried to pull one on us and become the master of all the different modes. Nice try, Nincha! We therefore restored Yocha and Baimei to their rightful places. Phew!

• The leaderboards have been completely redone, so you can see in a glance what rank you’re at and who’s the top cat to overpass. They also look a little nicer, don’tcha think?

We hope these changes will help you progress even more on your Chinese learning journey!

Be sure to let us know what you think of them

Sarah and The Nincha Team

Ninchanese combines addictive game mechanics, cute cats and efficient Chinese learning techniques to make learning Chinese a lot of fun! The app is now in beta so sign up now for early access to the beta! Check out our trailer and stay in touch with us on Facebook, Twitter, Google + and Pinterest.

The post Kickass Vocabulary learning on Ninchanese! appeared first on Ninchanese.