The quest to make learning Chinese characters easy

Chinese characters are consistently cited as one of the hardest things in Chinese by learners, and it’s not hard to understand why.

Haven’t you ever felt stuck trying to read a text in Chinese? Characters can sometimes be seen as impenetrable fortresses, yielding no clue whatsoever as to what they mean or can be pronounced. We’ve all experienced that feeling at one point or another of our learning journey. However, we also know it doesn’t have to be that way.

And so at Ninchanese, we are always on the lookout for new ways to make learning Chinese characters easier and faster, breakthroughs that make learning Chinese characters an easier task.

A learning order to organize them all?

When we chanced upon Loach and Wang’s study on how best to learn Chinese characters and words, we were astonished by their discoveries and the new algorithm they used.

Loach & Wang have decided to join forces and built a mathematically sound, logical approach to the order in which Chinese characters should be learned, based on data. Harnessing machine learning, network theory, and cognitive science, the two researchers built an algorithm to lower the cost of learning new Chinese characters ( = making it easier for you to learn them, what’s not to love?). How? By presenting them in an intelligent way. Intelligent because it takes into account a number of elements that are at the heart of Chinese characters and the Chinese language. Elements such as word and character frequency, the hierarchical structure of characters, the components they are made of, and several other variables, all mixed together to devise an optimal learning order. For you, little dragon.

The order in which you’ll be learning Chinese characters is optimal in that it goes back to the big bang of Chinese. To the roots of the language, to seek out an order and structure in the way Chinese characters are built. To help you understand the logic behind Chinese characters because once you learn to do that, it becomes easier and faster for you to learn new characters based on the ones you know.

Optimal also in that it strives to cost you the least learning effort possible. By making connections between characters and teaching you the ones, you need to know first. So it’s easier for you and a faster process. That’s why it can rocket fuel your character acquisition.

We just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to introduce this new approach to you. And so… We’re very excited to bring you an all-new world that goes back to the Big Bang of Chinese characters!

Your key: a whole new world on Ninchanese

Yes, we’ve created a brand new world solely dedicated to learning Chinese characters in this new order: the Universe of Chinese characters. 5000 whopping characters and words to learn in a science-backed, magic-fueled world.

100% focused on Chinese characters and fully based on this scientific research, this world promises to present you Chinese characters to learn in the most efficient order possible, backed up with the SRS power of Ninchanese for lasting memorization. It’ll highlight the link(s) between characters, their governing logic and, through that, will take you through thousands of Chinese characters and words. This world is nothing like you have seen before and
we hope you’ll have a blast learning Chinese characters this way.

The Big Bang question asked here is: How can we learn Chinese characters faster?

At the core of this new level, and the research that is its foundation, is a single desire: to maximize your learning efficiency in Chinese. Because here’s a secret: learning Chinese characters is often viewed as daunting, but when Chinese characters make sense, they become dramatically easier to learn.

In other words, the more components and Chinese characters you learn, the easier and faster it becomes for you to learn new characters based on the ones you know. It’s a breakthrough in how the Chinese characters are learned. You can read the result of this research here.

Maximizing your learning efficiency to increase your character retention while costing you the least effort possible, thanks to a cool new algorithm. Sounds appealing, right? But how does it work, and what does that mean? Let us take you through the new world’s way of working.

Let’s take a macro view: Chinese Language Big Data

There are, as you know, a ton of Characters in the Chinese language. They all contain a large amount of information if you know what to look for.  Information such as the character meaning components and phonetic components that make characters up, and plenty more.
We need to extract all of this information, figure out their connections, and use these relationships to build a logical order.  By understanding the logic behind the way Chinese characters are built, you can devise an order in which to learn them that makes the most sense, both scientifically and academically.

A Chinese character Universe to learn

You’ll learn to view Chinese characters as a group of families with their parents, children, cousins, and so on. They all come from one big tree with a few roots, and that’s what this world wants you to see. We’ll take you back to the Big Bang of how Chinese Characters were formed because becoming familiar with the roots and the primitive aspects of Chinese characters help greatly with learning a new character more easily.  

In this new world, each stage is dedicated to a limited set of words, and choose to focus on the characters you’d need to learn to be at ease with those words, as well as the character components you want to be familiar with.

In each stage, learn words and the characters that are key to know and the components that’ll shed light on how the characters are built!

To say it more specifically, In this world, we optimize the learning process of Chinese characters by ordering Chinese Characters using a novel topological sorting algorithm. Thanks to the new algorithm, you’ll see the benefits of learning Chinese Characters in order of usage frequency and in order of their hierarchal structural relationships. For example, you’ll learn the semantic-phonetic compounds of a Chinese character before learning the characters. It means that you’ll deploy fewer efforts to learn new words thanks to a special learning order.

Using this approach teaches you what to look for in a Chinese Character and where to look, and that’ll allow you to recognize/guess the meaning or its pronunciation instantly or nearly so. In other words, in this new world on Ninchanese, you will learn the real meaning of characters by learning first their ancestors, that is to say, from where they come from and how they are built. Here’s an example of a character tree:

Primitive characters appear as characters in their own right, whereas primitive components do not. The primitive component 灬 is an abbreviated form of the primitive character 火. The parameter r is the SUBTLEX-CH usage frequency rank of the character. Pronunciations are given in pinyin romanization. Note that each character is only assigned a single meaning. That is even though most actually possess a range of broadly related meanings.

More bang for your buck, what’s not to like in the idea?

The study compares the new algorithm to other well-known character learning methods, such as Heisig’s. It found that it outperforms previously published orders and algorithms.

How? The idea behind this new algorithm is also to introduce useful words you’ll be able to use productively right away. You won’t just be learning components. Characters and their components are only introduced when they compose multiple-character words or when the character forms a single-character word itself.

In short, it’s all about learning Chinese characters and words in a special order. This order takes into account:

• character frequencies,
• word frequencies,
• phonetic components,
• semantic components (aka meaning components),
• primitive components,
• the number of strokes,
• the relationship between them,
• and more.

This has a number of benefits. It’ll tremendously develop your character recognition and acquisition. What’s more, it will also help you distinguish similar sounds and characters and also characters that share the same sound.

Learn characters and words you’ll be able to use right away

This approach to learning to read and write Chinese has another clear advantage. The words you learn can be put to immediate and productive use when reading and writing sentences. These activities help the learning process. That’s why you’ll be learning Chinese characters in an optimal learning order.

Even if you are mainly focused on learning immediately useful words, you will find this new world useful. You’ll be able to recognize words more easily after learning the characters and words in the Universe World. That, in turn, will help you learn sentences and grammar more easily.

Note: Sometimes, you’ll be learning characters that are rarely used on their own. That’ll be because these characters are often found in words of 2 or more characters. These, however, are very frequently encountered. It’s a great way to understand a word deeper and learn it faster. Just keep in mind that by learning these characters, you’ll be adding them to our collection of learned words on Ninchanese and in your SRS. So, if you don’t want to learn components or single characters you won’t find yourself using as is, we recommend doing the classic story worlds of Ninchanese first.

So, what do you think? Ready to experience a new way of learning Chinese characters that’s both easy and fast for you? All thanks to the help of an algorithm that devised a clever order in which you should learn them?  We sure hope you have a blast learning Chinese characters this way! Be sure to let us know your thoughts!

We wish you success in your Chinese learning!

The Nincha Team

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

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The post New world: The Chinese Character Universe – Science-based Chinese character learning appeared first on Ninchanese.

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

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

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

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