Baimei, your new favorite cat to speak Chinese to!

Meet Baimei: with her, you’ll learn to meow purrfectly in Chinese!

As one of our Nincha learners put it, in our voice recognition stages, “it’s great not to have to talk to another human being”…because it’s so much better to practice speaking Chinese to a cat, right? ^^

Baimei was always supposed to be the one helping you speaking Chinese. As you may have noticed; she’s often in the dialogues, but she wasn’t actually in the interface. That was a terrible misunderstanding and it’s now been fixed.

Hello Baimei!

A new flow: it’s easier than ever to speak Chinese

Based on your feedback, our last big beta update had focused on improving Yocha’s stages and making your experience learning how sentences work on Chinese a little less intense and a lot more fun. After that, we completely reworked the content to make it  gradual and extremely progressive. The idea? Make sure Nincha’s the only teaching you new words!

Now, we took advantage of this switch to improve the dialogues, based on all you wonderful Nincha Learners’ feedback and Baimei’s demands.

See, Baimei’s likes things to be easy to use, practical and straightforward. She also carefully listened to all your feedback inputs and was able to pinpoint all the areas you wanted improvements in. Here’s what she asked us to implement, now that she is rightfully taking care of the Dialogue stages:

1. to be able to listen to a sentence again before saying it

2. to make it once you’re done saying a sentence, it moves automatically onto the next one

3. to have something that let you Nincha learners know when Baimei is ready to listen to you speak Chinese.

All wonderful ideas, of course, so we happily complied with her – and your – demands and it’s really improved the flow, we think. Do you agree?

Here’s how the dialogues work now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r64Ed4W_ygw

Can’t see the video above? View it here

Meowtastically simple to use, huh?

You listen to the sentence, then you speak. The words you’ve properly pronounced turn green. The words you mispronounced become red.

If you want to know why they became red, simply click on them and we’ll show you what Baimei heard instead.

Like this:

Can’t see the video above? View it here

Baimei also told us she couldn’t hear some users but had no way to tell them that was the case…. So we added comments to let you know what’s going on.

Sometimes the mic doesn’t pick up what you say. It happens. Now it tells you when it’s the case and nicely asks you to repeat.

Sometimes, there are issues with your Internet speed which prevent Baimei from processing what you just said and telling you if it’s correct or not: you’ll now get a little message that tells you when that’s the case. This should come in particularly handy for our Nincha Learners based in China who use a VPN and suffer from a slow connection.

Many of you had also reported there were issues with how numbers were recognized, and how some words were tough to be recognized (homophones, essentially). That’s been fixed too!

So, dear Nincha users, you know what you have to do: come on over to Ninchanese and go speak Chinese with Baimei!

We’ll be adding tweaks and little improvements here and there over the next few weeks but right now, we want to know:

What do you think of this dialogue update? Do you like it?
Let us know what you think of it, we want to know!

Purr, furr and all that good stuff,

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 Beta update: better voice recognition in Chinese appeared first on Ninchanese.

We’re wrapping up our second month of beta and above all, we really wanted to thank you for your feedback. Your ideas and comments are spot-on and they really contribute to building the best Chinese learning experience on Ninchanese!

Thanks to your many feedback inputs, we have updated a few things to enhance the way you learn Mandarin Chinese on Ninchanese. This update focused most on the grammar stages, and we also made a few other changes to make your experience less confusing and more fun!

So Yocha was maybe a little too strict…

The sentence ordering stages were initially a little too focused on experimentation, so we changed that. Yocha was keen on getting you to try and try again until you got the Chinese sentence right, so that you would *feel* how the sentence worked in Chinese. But it turns out that was quite hard and some people got stuck. Being stuck is not something we want – nor does Yocha, even if he likes challenging you from time to time! So we’ve updated those stages so they work the same way you learn Chinese vocabulary.

Now, when you don’t get the sentence order right, we give you a chance to try it again later and show you the correct answer. That gives you time to see the sentence’s structure in Chinese! You’re then given another sentence to answer. It’s interesting to compare that sentence with the previous one, pick out the pattern, understand the logic and try to apply it! Then the sentence you got wrong before comes back and you can try your hand at it again. In this way, you really work on understanding how to make a sentence and integrate the logic of that Chinese grammar point.

We’ve also added a little “help” button in each stage that sends you directly to the corresponding grammar lesson. That way, if you feel lost, you can read the lesson. We clearly believe that to memorize something, you have to experiment with it, actively work with it and so on to remember it, but sometimes, reading the lesson first is really the best way to understand the whole thing.

Last thing about the grammar section, Yocha now gives you better comments to help you succeed even more!

Your daily miaotifications

We also reworked the leaderboard – it had a few glitches here and there – and we now send you daily emails to help you come back everyday on Ninchanese.

Because, if you really want to learn Chinese, we recommend you come learn a little something in Chinese every day. The best way to remember what you learn is to regularly do your vocabulary reviews, try to get 100% goood on each stage, and to unlock at least one stage per day. Short 20 minutes sessions are enough, you’ll see. So, each day, you’ll get a sweet little email from us, telling you about what you need to do, how your friends are doing in the app, the reviews that are waiting for you and the challenges you have to play. Isn’t that nice?

We’re working on also bringing you a daily traning program so you know which steps to take each day on Ninchanese to master Chinese!

New illustrations and badges!

We have also added a new illustration for the first world and we hope you like it! You’ll also be discovering the illustrations for the 5 next worlds in 2015, so that is very soon ;)!

In addition, we cleaned up some links that went nowhere and hid some pages that were not quite finished yet so the experience on Ninchanese is less confusing. Scoring in some stages was also fixed, especially in the reviews: you can now really earn points for your longest chain! We know that bugged some of you.

Lastly, and because you really deserve it: you can now win the “beta user”badge! Just log out and log in again to Ninchanese and you’ll get it.

So there you have it, the first major updates in the Ninchanese beta! We hope you like what we’ve done!

Plenty more to come

You’ve given us a lot of great feedback, which we are working to implement as fast as possible. We also still have a lot of ideas to implement and we hope to bring you all that soon. Remember, we’re just a little team of three Ninchas, but we’re all working as hard as we can So keep an eye out, more fun features are yet to come!

Again, thank you all for your help. We love hearing from you and consider you all part of the NinchaTeam!

We wish you a happy end of the year!

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 Weibo.

The post Beta updates for Ninchanese appeared first on Ninchanese.