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.

“People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.”

Samuel Johnson, an 18th century English essayist, pinpointed this important fact early on: a key to long term memory retention is being reminded.

Learning is all about retention

When studying, you want to be actually learning and remembering things for a while. So, it’s important to be working on both aspects at the same time. Say, you’re learning Chinese (and we hope you are!). You want to be continuously learning new things, while counteracting the “forgetting curve”.

Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve

What’s the forgetting curve you ask? Well it has to do with how your memory performs over time and more specifically, how your memory retention declines over time. It was devised by Hermann Ebbinghaus in the 19th century, after he tested his own memory. Crazy! This Wired article explains how intense his experiment was:

“In experiments of breathtaking rigor and tedium, Ebbinghaus practiced and recited from memory 2.5 nonsense syllables a second, then rested for a bit and started again. […] Ebbinghaus trained this way for more than a year.”

Typically, your memory retention declines like this:

The forgetting curve shows the average amount of time it takes you to forget a fact. (c) Wikimedia 

Memory decays but you can do something about it

Ok, so my memory decays. Can I do anything about it?

Of course! First, you want a method that teaches you content in the best possible way. A method that ensures optimal short-term memorization. Personally, we’re advocates of the hands-on, active learning approaches. You’re active; you’re engaged; you’re in control of your learning experience because you’re not passively listening to a lecture. Your fire is being lit, as one would say in the 19th century.

Then, you couple this with a method that reminds you of your learning. This gradually shifts what you’ve learned from your short-term memory to mid and long-term memory. Then, the time and effort you’ve spent on training is fully leveraged.

This method should effectively monitor your memory over time (to assess how well or how little you’re remembering an item over time) and prevent decay by re-submitting you the knowledge you’re about to forget, right when you’re about to forget it.

Spaced Repetition System: the best thing that was invented (second only to French Toast)

That method is called the Spaced Repetition System. The basis for this algorithm (Ebbinghaus again) is that each time you successfully encounter a fact, the amount of time it’ll take you to forget the fact again increases. You’re reviewing things at the ideal moment: when you’re on the brink of forgetting them and therefore when you’re most likely to remember those facts.

That way, you’re not wasting time reviewing content you already know; and you don’t forget things because you forgot to think about re-learning them. It’s effective, it’s efficient. And it’s fantastic. Especially for language learners. Even more specifically for Chinese learners, where a lot of the vocabulary acquisition has to do with memorization and not so much with logic.

Because an image speaks louder than words (and because their graph is both clear and pretty nice looking), behold, Wired’s depiction of the SRS:

The video below shows the advantages of the SRS over other memorization methods, in a colored light kind of way. (Start at 2:30 to see the simulations, it’s all text before that)

Okay, this sounds great. But how does this system know when I’m going to forget it?

First of, the optimal moments to be reminded have been carefully and scientifically calculated, based on the spacing effect Ebbinghaus also coined. Those moments are shown in the Wired graph. Those are an integral part of the SRS systems. The system also counts on you to tell it.

Active recall vs. honesty-based recall

In some SRS applications (SuperMemo for instance, from which a lot of the research comes from), you say how well you know the knowledge the system is showing you by rating your knowledge on a scale to one to five. This tells the system where you stand; whether to show you that bit again soon or not so soon.

Personally, we find this leaves room for error. If you’re feeling lazy, you can just click and say “yes, I know this”. It’s pretty easy to cheat the system. Obviously, you’re the one learning, so there’s no reason for you to try to cheat yourself. But still, we feel mankind will try to game the system whenever possible.

Therefore, for us, here at Ninchanese, active recall is the only way to go. The system is the one assessing whether you know or not, not you, based on your answers (and a number of other criteria). You’re being active (here is the active learning principle again!) because you have to come up with the answer yourself; not just say whether you think you know it or not. This is the best way to learn.

That’s the beauty of technology: it helps you become a better you. Well, in this case, it helps you maximize your learning experience. It tells you what to learn and when.This is key to long-term retention.

Ultimately, that’s all you want to get out of learning something. To remember it : Spaced repetition.  To be able to use it : Spaced repetition.

The Nincha Team

title photo credit: Flооd via photopin

Ninchanese is a great new app where you’ll have fun learning Chinese. We’re still working on it, so sign up to be invited to the beta when we launch! And stay in touch with us on Facebook, Twitter, Google + and Weibo. 

The post Spaced repetition: Use it and learn Chinese for good appeared first on Ninchanese.

Our memory forgets things in 6 weeks

Studies show that in as little as six weeks, skills can return to nearly pre-learning levels if not used at all. So when learning anything, if you want to actually learn and remember something for more than 6 weeks, finding a way to apply your new knowledge, in a way or another, is a good idea. So go practice. Especially when it comes to learning Chinese…

Chinese can be easy to forget

Chinese can be a tricky language. It’s particularly easy to forget what you’ve learned and thought you mastered. You thought you knew those characters so well they were ingrained in you, only to find when you start classes again or when you want to speak Chinese again after a Chinese-learning free summer, that you didn’t, after all. That’s because, more than any language, Chinese needs to be practiced – or used – often to keep your language skills sharp.

Practice Chinese in short bursts

The idea is to practice Chinese often, very often in fact. Like regularly even. Ideally, that would be 30 min sessions every day, at least once a day. If you don’t have time for that, try squeezing in some extra study time every time you have a few minutes to spare. That’ll go a long way towards you learning and memorizing things better. Olle Linge, from Hacking Chinese, writes a great article on how to distribute your learning sessions efficiently, based on how much time you have and where you’re studying.

OK, so you’re now having regular study sessions. The thing is, it’s not only a question of practicing regularly; it’s also a question of practicing well and efficiently.

Focus on one key aspect of Chinese at a time…

…and then take a break. Change things up and study something else for a bit. Like say, you’ve been learning to recognize characters and pronounce them for a while. Focus on grammar rules for a bit, or work on building sentences with the words you’ve just learned. Or just watch a video of Op China Style. You’ll learn the character 来 – lái with no problem!

That way, you’re resting your brain by engaging other skill sets. Ultimately, this helps you learn better overall. Because by switching up what you study and then coming back to what you were studying previously, you’re diversifying your learning without even noticing. And that’s a clever thing to do.

If you’re concentrating on one type of exercise for a long period of time, after a while your productivity level will drop. You won’t be as focused as you should be, and therefore not properly memorizing what you’re learning. So change it up; do something that requires a different type of effort. Give your brain a good workout! It’s good for it.

Practicing and repetition is good for your memory

In fact, when it comes to memorizing  it turns out effort and practice have a big role to play! As long as you do it in an intelligent way.  Because rote learning (also known as learning by heart) and repeating words over and over until the words you’ve been repeating no longer mean anything  (try repeating the word “sugar” over and over. You’ll see what we mean) might seem like a good option when cramming for an exam, those techniques won’t help with your long-term memorization. In fact, the more you try to cram in, the less you’ll retain.

Spaced practice: the best way to go

The best way to practice is to space out your practices as this’ll maximize the efficiency of your learning or practice session. Indeed, research shows spaced practice helps learners retain access to memorized information over long periods of time. It’s a robust and powerful learning technique. Yes, spaced repetition is crucial.

So, when practicing your language skills, remember to take it nice and easy (no cramming!), to practice regularly, in short bursts, apply spaced practice (we’ll tell you soon how we’ll help you with that… ) and you’ll be recalling loads of content before you know it!

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

The post Practice: Refresh your Chinese and don’t forget! appeared first on Ninchanese.