Best wishes for the Mid-Autumn Festival

中秋节快乐! 
Zhōng qiū jié kuài lè!
Happy mid-autumn festival!

Why is the festival called the “Mid-autumn” Festival?

First things first. If you break down the Chinese name 中秋节 (Zhōng qiū jié), you get 中[zhōng] (middle) + 秋[qiū] (autumn) + 节[jié] (holiday). Why is that?

To us, the name of this festival, which is “Mid-autumn Festival,” begs the question: Why is this festival called the Mid-Autumn festival held on the first day of Autumn?

This year, the Chinese Mid-Autumn festival happens to fall on September 21st, the beginning of Fall. But that’s not what one should focus on. What’s important to know is that this festival, like all Chinese festivals, follows the lunar calendar. 中秋节 is celebrated each year on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month. Because that’s the day the Autumn harvest ends. Incidentally, 秋  also means “Harvest time.”  The 15th is also the middle of the month, and the 8th lunar month is the middle of autumn. Hence the name, Mid-Autumn.
In our western calendar, its date changes slightly every year and ranges from mid-September to early October.

A magical way to celebrate the full moon

Okay, now that’s out of the way, what is this Chinese festival? What magical mid-autumn festival traditions are there? What do we do during it? This traditional Chinese festival is all about the full moon.

When the moon shines the brightest, Chinese people worldwide celebrate the Mid-Autumn festival.

Mid-autumn Festival Traditions

Gaze at the moon and make wishes

On this day, in China, the moon shines at its brightest. The Chinese believe it’s the purrfect time to send prayers for good luck. In ancient times, they would wish for a great next harvest next year, and now, they wish each other luck in life and business. That’s why the festival is sometimes called the Moon festival. Lanterns are often lit and sent out into the starry sky, carrying with them our wishes.

Join in the fun with mooncakes

What else? Ah yes, you’re going to like this next part. The mooncake festival is all about eating, and everyone should partake in at least one of the delicious Mid-Autumn festival food traditions. Yes, to celebrate the moon, we eat delicious mooncakes filled with all sorts of things. The fillings may be traditional lotus seed paste, egg yolk, red bean paste, or more innovative. That’s why this festival is also sometimes called the Mooncake festival.

The mooncakes are elaborately decorated, with patterns usually depicting the festival’s legends. Mooncakes now range from the traditional kind, rich and dense, with usually a duck egg in the center,

to modern takes on them, with a more delicate flavor and made with rice flour, such as the snowflake skin mooncakes. You’ll even find some iced, filled with ice cream. Luckily for us, stores and pastry shops usually sell mooncakes in small sizes, sometimes even bite-sized, which allows you to sample several.

Kick off October with some quality family time

The full moon also represents a family reunion. Due to that, the festival is also a big family moment, and getting together is a crucial Mid-Autumn festival tradition. Everyone gets three days off for it! If you’re in China or with a Chinese family, you’ll typically have a big celebratory meal with your family. You’ll eat, talk and sit together and enjoy the glorious moon. You can also have this experience with your Nincha family on the Ninchanese app in a special Mid-Autumn-themed world! In the Dialogue, you’ll be learning with Yocha a quote from a famous Mid-Autumn poem and will chat about the Mid-Autumn Festival.

When did the Mid-Autumn festival really begin?

No one knows for sure, but we do know this festival is thousands of years old!

Over 2000 years ago

The earliest records of the Mid-Autumn festival found are over 2000 years old, during the Han Dynasty.

In the 10th century AD, the festival date became fixed.

From there, the celebration steadily grew in popularity. As early as the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD), the festival began being celebrated all over China, with much of the Mid-Autumn festival traditions appearing then. At the time, the date for the Mid-Autumn festival still varied. In the Song dynasty (960 – 1279 AD),  the festival’s date became officially fixed. It has become a yearly custom every since and is still a festival that means a lot to Chinese people worldwide. Did you know, however, that this festival only became a public holiday in 2008?

The Legends of the Autumn Full Moon Festival

Many have written poems and stories about the moon festival, and there are many legends around the Mid-Autumn festival. Among those, Chang’e Flying to the Moon is the most widely known.

Chang’e, Goddess of Heaven

It goes like this:
Once upon a time, Chang’e was married to Hou Yi, a real hotshot at the time (what?! he literally was! He was a heroic archer who shot down nine of the ten suns believed to have existed in ancient times).

Chang’e bringing mooncakes on a platter for the Chinese Mid-Autumn festival

Tasked with protecting an elixir that would allow Houyi to ascend directly to Heaven, Chang’e found herself forced to drink it. Then, desperate to stay close to her love, she managed to fly to the moon, the nearest place to Earth in heaven. There, she eventually adopted an immortal pet rabbit (that’s a different story), and that’s why ever since she’s been represented this way.

Chang’e and her rabbit

It is believed that Hou Yi, who sorely missed Chang’e, would serve the food she liked best when the full moon shone the brightest. Awwww. And that’s how, according to the legend, the Mid-Autumn festival began.

Mooncakes to fight the Mongols

There is another Mid-Autumn folktale so meowsome it sounds like a legend, except it actually happened.
In the late Yuan Dynasty (1271 to 1368 AD), people were unhappy with their rulers, the Mongols, and so, the resistance wanted to plot an uprising. To keep their messages hidden, a counselor had the brilliant idea of hiding notes inside the mooncakes, indicating when the uprising should occur. The revolt was very successful, and so, from then on, each year, the new ruler rewarded his subjects with mooncakes to commemorate that fateful day.

Since then, eating mooncakes took on a different meaning and has become even more of a tradition.

Talk about the Mid-Autumn festival in Chinese

Want to discover more about this festival? Then the new content on Ninchanese is precisely what you need. So check it out now; it’s available for free, this week only!

Three Special Event Stages for you on Ninchanese

A unique themed world to celebrate the Mid-Autumn festival, this week only!

There’s a new pop-up advanced world for you to discover for the occasion! Join in the Mid-Autumn festival celebrations with this themed exclusive world. In it, you can:

• Learn vocabulary to understand and discuss the Mid-Autumn festival
• Build sentences to talk and wish someone a happy Mid-Autumn festival in Mandarin
• Express yourself in Chinese: Learn to speak about the Mid-Autumn festival in the new dialogue
• Train your ear: Listening practice to be ready to talk about the festival in Chinese

The best part? It’s free all this week! So hurry! It’ll soon be gone.

Best paired with a yummy mooncake to keep your brain juices flowing. Enjoy and happy Chinese learning!

The Nincha Team

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

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The post Marvelous Mid-Autumn Festival Traditions and Stories appeared first on Ninchanese.

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!

The post World HSK 5: An Epic world for Epic Chinese learning 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.

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