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: 

1. Go to your deck page, 
2. Create a new stage with a name and a description, 
3. 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.

The post Update on Ninchanese: Nincha Decks – Even More Personalized Learning! 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.

Luckily for you, this album cover is an interesting collage of Chinese tickets and boarding passes!

The album is by 好妹妹 (Haomeimei), a Chinese band with a soft style, plenty of kid songs and cool graphics.

So what am I seeing here? Chinese tickets!

The larger ones are Chinese tickets for planes boarding passes.

The smaller ones are Chinese tickets for trains.

The blue Chinese tickets are magnetic card tickets

The pink ones, which were a lot more common but are being increasingly replaced by the blue ones, are paper tickets

To know more about train tickets, you can read this article!

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 Weibo.

The post Chinese tickets: trains and planes, oh my! appeared first on Ninchanese.

What is Halloween called in Chinese?

 

Halloween in Chinese is 万圣节 (wànshèngjié).
It litterally means the “thousand – or many – spirit holiday”.

So that’s how you say Halloween in Chinese: 万圣节 (wànshèngjié).

Note: The Chinese name of Halloween also covers the next day, which is known as “All Saints Day” in other parts of the world!

To wish someone a Happy Halloween in Chinese, say 万圣节快乐 (wànshèngkuàilè!)!

Halloween traditions in Chinese

A big Halloween tradition is carving pumpkins. What are you going to carve on your pumpkin?

A pumpkin is called a 南瓜 (Nánguā).

Are you going to stick with the traditional scary/smiley face for your Jack-O-Lantern or attempt something different? What about carving your favorite Chinese characters, perhaps? Bet it’s good practice!

Can you guess what a Jack-O-Lantern is called in Chinese?

Hint: think about it in no-nonsense mode. How would you simply describe a Jack-O-Lantern to someone? What would you tell them?

A Jack-O-Lantern is, really, a light in a pumpkin! 

So that’s why the Chinese call a Jack-O-Lantern: 南瓜灯 (Nánguādēng). This literally means a pumpkin light.

A Jack-O-Lantern is called a 南瓜灯 (Nánguādēng).

Carve your pumpkin like a Nincha!

This is our 南瓜灯 project: a lucky Nincha cat Jack-o-lantern! That’s right, we carved your favorite Chinese teacher on a pumpkin for Halloween too!
Want to make your own Nincha pumpkin?  Here are the instructions if you want to give it a try too!

Happy trick or treating!

The Nincha Team

Ninchanese is a mew platform where you’ll have fun learning Chinese. Stay in touch with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Weibo.

The post What is Halloween in Chinese? appeared first on Ninchanese.