In this update, the focus was on design to improve your user experience learning Chinese, as that’s always one of our priorities. This design update also is a big step toward getting Ninchanese ready for its release on mobile devices. Here’s what’s new in this design update.

A new and improved selection screen

Ninchanese currently offers Chinese content for levels ranging from complete beginner to advanced.  However, it appeared that this wide range of content and learning material wasn’t visible enough to some users, who tended to stick to the beginner area and not notice they could skip ahead to material that suited their level of Chinese better.
So, to make the different levels in Ninchanese more visible and more easily accessible, we’ve completely redesigned the world selection area.  Now all islands are visible, so you can click on them or slide the islands until you find the world that suits you.

Each world corresponds to a specific level of Ninchanese: World 1 is for newbies in Chinese, i.e., complete beginners in Chinese, World 2 is for elementary Chinese learners, World 3 is for intermediate Chinese learners, and World 4 is for upper-intermediate Mandarin Chinese learners. In addition, we also launched advanced Chinese courses, which are World 5 and 6 of Ninchanese.

Plus, we think it looks prettier, and we think you will too.

A new menu

The left-hand menu in the app was also completely redesigned to be easier to use on mobile devices and to allow you to navigate Ninchanese more easily. This is what it looks like now:

Now, you have all the shortcuts you need in one handy place. In addition, the new menu is light, pleasant, and efficient. Trust us, and You’ll particularly enjoy this new menu when using Ninchanese on mobile devices. Neat-o!

We are paving the way for Ninchanese’s first Mobile App!

We have also gone over most of the pages in Ninchanese to make your browsing experience smoother and more pleasant, especially on mobile devices, such as phones and tablets. There’s still some work needed for some pages, but don’t worry, we’re on it.

Our goal is to go over the pages in Ninchanese and reduce the loading time of the app’s pages. So now, you’ll have a more fluid and generally faster experience learning on Ninchanese, especially when you’re using a mobile device.

Even better yet! This design update paves the way for Ninchanese’s first mobile app,

 What else is new in this design update?

The password reset page has been redesigned. You can now reset your password in style! We’ve also fixed and squashed bugs, as we always do. You guys are excellent at spotting and reporting bugs, and we thank you for that!

We regularly update some aspects of Ninchanese and improve the way your Chinese learning application works. Because we do that pretty regularly, sometimes we don’t write a blog post detailing the changes at the time. But plenty has changed since the last update, which added a whole Chinese-English and English-Chinese dictionary to Ninchanese! Things such as:

• Easier access to more information on a stage – now, when you start a new stage, have you noticed you can:
  • Click on See More to see more details on the stage’s content. You’ll be able to see the list of words you’ll be learning or the list of sentences you’ll be learning to put together, speak or understand
  • Read and reread the story as much as you want? Just click on the Read Story button
  • View the lesson, if you’re doing a sentence-building stage with Yocha

• No more “to” – A number of you had told us via feedback and through the Nincha Chat on Slack that having to systematically type “to” before a verb was annoying and counter-productive. So we listened, and no made typing the “to” noncompulsory. So if you want to type “to be called” or ” be called” for 叫, you now can! We’re always happy to make changes, no matter how small, to make your learning experience on Ninchanese more pleasant and intuitive.

How do you like the new changes? We love hearing what you think, like, or believe could be improved, so let us know, either in the app or via the Chat!

See you soon for a new update!

Sarah, a meowsome member of:

The Nincha Team

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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.

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