New Android App version

There’s a new Android app out for Ninchanese, fully ready for Android 11 and 12!

It contains all the features you know and love to learn Chinese. And, it has the bonus of being stabler, safer and faster, especially on the newer versions of Android!

Download it now on the Play Store!

What about the old app?

Unfortunately, with the roll-out of Android 12, the previous app got buggy for an increasing number of learners. As a result, the app started crashing on launch. Maybe it even happened to you. As such, it was time to say goodbye to that version of the Android App.

The old app will soon be entirely deprecated, i.e., no longer in use. So, long live the new Android app instead!

Download it now from the Play Store.

We need your help! The app will exist by downloading it and leaving us a review

We know some of you have been using Ninchanese for a long time and how it’s helped you progress in Chinese. And now, we’re the ones who need your help! So, if you love Ninchanese and download the new Android app, please rate the app and leave us a review.

Every (positive) review you leave the App on the Play Store helps its ranking in the play Store. It does!

Think about how much ratings and reviews affect your decision to download an app. Everyone else works the same.

So ratings and (good) reviews are the best way to get new Chinese learners on Ninchanese. They are also the best way for the app to be visible on the Play Store. That’s because ratings, the words used in a review, and downloads are data Google cares a lot about. So they affect an app’s ranking.

In other words: the new Ninchanese Android app is starting over from zero, so we need your help! Your ratings and reviews will help it tremendously. So, please consider leaving us a 5-star rating and a review if you feel like it!

Even if you already rated the old app in the past, we need your support again! We’ll be forever grateful.

Traditional Chinese out of beta

The new version of the Android app is not the only new element in this update. Last but not least, traditional Chinese learning is now available for all.

After being in beta for a time and tested by many learners, learning with traditional characters is ready.

Thank you all for thoroughly testing Ninchanese with Traditional Chinese characters and sending us your feedback!

Want to start learning Traditional Chinese?

Easily switch to Traditional Chinese in your settings.

All you need to do is head to your settings and, more specifically, to the learning tab. Choose whether you want to learn in Simplified or in Traditional Characters. That’s it; you’re all set!

Two independent learning tracks

Good to know: Learning in Simplified and Traditional Chinese are two independent tracks.

In other words, once you’ve switched to Traditional Chinese, you start from the beginning again. Your stats and progress will be at 0 again, so you can learn Traditional Chinese from scratch.

If you want to learn the simplified form again, all you need to do is switch back to that character set in your settings. Then, you’ll be able to pick up where you left off in simplified Chinese.

These settings allow you to quickly choose what character form you want to use and even learn both simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese if you wish to!

Traditional Chinese is essential in the Sinosphere. Traditional Characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and many overseas Chinese communities outside Southeast Asia.

Related: Wondering which Chinese characters to learn? Read this page on Traditional Chinese to see if it’s for you!

Have fun learning on Android and in Traditional Chinese, little dragons!

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!

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The post New Ninchanese Android App and Traditional Chinese Available appeared first on Ninchanese.

Rest assured your payments are safe on Ninchanese, with the extra layer of security just added to the app: 3D Secure.

What’s 3D Secure? (A quick overview – skip ahead if you want)

If you regularly buy items online, you may already be familiar with the 3D Secure flow. You enter your card details to confirm a payment, and then a window appears where your bank asks you for a code or password to approve the purchase.

In other words, 3D Secure requires you to input an extra item of information at checkout. This item is used to authenticate your purchase because it is sent to your bank. Your bank uses this to confirm it’s really you behind the transaction. In short, double-check = extra peace of mind.

Why are we talking about all this? Granted, it’s a departure from our usual Chinese learning tips, resources to play and learn in Chinese, and vocabulary lists. But it’s a useful one because 3D secure has now been implemented on Ninchanese. What for?

Extra Safe Payments on Ninchanese

Now, when you upgrade to a Premium Plan on Ninchanese to progress in Chinese (and you totally should :D), you can rest assured your payment is extra secure. It always was, of course, but now it’s extra secure.
Why’s that? Because from now on, once you’ve entered your credit card information to upgrade, you may see a new window appear, with your bank’s name on it.

You’ll then be asked to enter more information, usually either a code sent to your phone or perhaps a password only known by you. Depending on the bank, the piece of extra information requested can vary. It could also be your fingerprint or even facial recognition.

While this might feel like an extra step to do, it’s, above all, an extra layer of protection for you. 

With 3D secure added to the checkout process, you can be sure it’s a legitimate transaction going through. You already knew that, of course, but knowing Ninchanese is 3DS compliant is extra proof that you can trust the company.

3D secure also reduces the risk of fraud.

Better Fraud protection

For Ninchanese, too, it’s an extra layer of protection. That’s because 3D secure also allows the company better protection against fraudulent transactions. No Fraud, no unhappy times!

Compliance with European requirements

Additionally, adding these card security measures is a European requirement. As Ninchanese is based in France, we must do this to be compliant with the various customer protection acts and requirements the European Government has established, such as the  Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) requirements in Europe. These requirements are very much on the consumer’s side (you) and are there to protect you online. We’re happy to support and be part of such protections!

The post Upgrade with a full peace of mind: 3D Secure on Ninchanese appeared first on Ninchanese.

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

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 Speed & Design update: Paving the way for the Android Mobile App! appeared first on Ninchanese.

In this update, we focused a lot on improving and reworking our way of dealing with Chinese characters. A lot of the work we did was behind the scenes, so you won’t be seeing a big part of the changes we’ve made. Don’t be jealous, you’ll soon be seeing the consequences and results of those background improvements! And not to worry, there’s still plenty to see in this update. Here are the changes and improvements what you can see in this update.

Waaaaay more Chinese words

Ninchanese used to be your fave Chinese learning tool, did you know it can now also be…. your go-to online dictionary? We’ve incorporated the whole CC-CEDICT database in Ninchanese for your viewing pleasure! That’s over 100, 000 Chinese characters and words you can now look up, explore and discover directly in the app.

As you can guess from this funny tweet, all sorts of words and names are now browsable in Ninchanese:

Tatatatat BATMAN ^^ 蝙蝠侠 – Biān fú xiá on @Ninchanese https://t.co/XvUzyMhRKK

— Jean-Remi (@JeanRemi_Laisne) 31 May 2016

More Chinese words to explore in Chinese meant more information to show you, so we seized this opportunity to improve the word pages for each character and word.

A detailed word page for each Chinese character and word (which you can share)

We reworked the way word pages worked to bring you more information on each word.  For a given word or Chinese character, say 猫, before the update, you could:

• Hear its pronunciation
• See its pinyin
• Read the character’s meaning(s)
• See its HSK level, when applicable
• See an animation of the stroke order
• See an example sentence for each of its meaning, when available
• Get information on the character’s composition: what components or elements is it made of?

Now, in addition to all that, when you look up a character, you can now also see:

• Simplified / Traditional form

Mandarin Chinese has two written forms: Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

Now, on each word page, you can see and switch between the two forms. It’s a first step towards the implementation of Traditional Chinese in Ninchanese!

• Compounds

Compounds are single characters that contain the character you looked up as one of their components. Here’s an example with the Chinese word 是 shì.  The character 提 tí , for instance, is a compound of 是 (where 扌 is the meaning component, providing a clue to the word’s meaning and 是 is the phonetic component – it’s a stretch, but tí sounds a little close to shì)

• Words that contain that character

Modern Chinese words are usually composed of more than one character so it’s always extremely interesting to see all the words that contain the character or characters you’re looking up.

For each single or multiple characters, you search for, you can now browse a list of the words that contain this character. This includes words that begin with the character you’re looking up and words that end with the character you’re looking up. Click on any of those words to see their definition in a separate page. Useful, no?

• Idioms

The Chinese language is well known for its idiomatic expressions, idioms, the most famous of all being its 4 character idioms, the 成语, chengyu. For each character or word you look up, we now show you the idioms that contain that character or word. Pretty cool way to discover new idioms, don’t you think?

Easily look up words

Say you want to look up a word in Chinese on Ninchanese?
Here’s a tip to easily look up new words: type app.ninchanese.com (also works on ninchanese.com) like you normally would, to access your Chinese learning app. You’ll see a new indication appear: 

Instead of pressing enter, hit “tab”.  This allows you to instantly look up a word on Ninchanese in your url bar and call up its word page directly. Nifty, don’t you think? Here’s a gif to show you exactly how it works:

Share the words you love

You can now also share each page on your favorite social network. You never know. Chinese is full of funny expressions and words. Maybe you’ll run into one you want to share with your pals? Or maybe you want to save it to one of your Pinterest boards for future reference? You can now do that and it’ll look like this:

What else is new?

In addition to adding a whole dictionary to Ninchanese and greatly improving our word pages, here are a few more notable changes you may want to know about.

Improving how we deal with polyphonic words

Did you know that some words in Chinese have multiple pronunciations and meanings, but look exactly the same? These characters are called polyphonic characters (literally, words with multiple pronunciations).

We used to show you the different pronunciations and meanings of a polyphonic character in the same word page.
Now there’s a page for each pronunciation and its assorted meanings and a link to its other pronunciations so you can learn each individually. They may look the same, but they are different characters after all. Like so:

Two things to know about learning polyphonic characters:

• There’s a chance you’ll need to be learning the new meanings and pronunciations as brand new words.
• When you’re reviewing the words you’ve learned, we’ll give you a hint as to which pinyin or meaning of the polyphonic character we’re asking you about; because otherwise, you have no way of knowing which word we’re asking you about!

More on typos

We’ve also made a few small improvements in the vocabulary stages:

– The typo detector now accepts tones entered as numbers: It used to reject number marks for tones, but it no longer does. Whoot!

– Hyphens? What hyphens? You can now type words with hyphens, with or without; we figure it was too mean to get an answer counted as wrong just because you didn’t use a hyphen properly. It’s a small step towards more flexibility in the answers we accept, let’s say.

These small but useful improvements conclude our round-up of the big, visible, changes brought about by this beta update.

Rest assured, there’s a lot more coming! Like I said in the beginning, this update is monumental. Monumental mainly in that it paves the way for a lot of things to come. You’ll see; there’ll be quite a few new big things added to Ninchanese in the coming weeks/ months; things like World 5 (for advanced Chinese learners, and HSK 5 takers), and traditional characters…

Sarah, a meowsome member of:

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 More Chinese Words for Ninchanese appeared first on Ninchanese.

 Oh look! A typo!

Are you the type to type really fast when you’re doing your reviews and to press enter with one hand before your other hand is done typing? Or perhaps you’re an ardent multitasker with a penchant for multiple tabs and one-hand typing? If any of that sounds familiar — or if you’re just really prone to making typing mistake — boy are you going to love the new typo detector on Ninchanese! It now gives you a second chance to correct your answer, both when you’re entering the meaning or the pronunciation, so you don’t get your answer wrong due to a silly typing mistake!

So far, the reactions we’ve gotten have been overwhelmingly positive and along the tunes of “Wow! Typo Detector! Awesome” and “Typo detection! Yay!!!” What’s yours going to be?
My suggestion: go give it a try right now and see how many times in one review session you get saved by the typo detector. I personally stopped counting :). The typo detector is now active in the Vocab stages with Nincha and in your reviews.

The typo detector will make each review milestone easier to finish, but if your reviews feel easier now, the typo detector is not the only thing to thank.

Reviews are now a walk in the park(almost)

See, a number of you voiced issues they had with the reviews, which got the Nincha Team thinking about improving how the review system works work; revising the difficulty settings and how we handle mistakes in a review session.

A more even mix of words

First up: showing you a more even distribution of hard (for you) and easier words to review.

The way the previous words were distributed placed a heavier emphasis on newly learned — or relearned words. We therefore worked on balancing that out; and aimed at turning your review session into a walk in the park. Well, a walk in a park with a few steep hills to climb now and then. Not all your words can be easy to review, or they wouldn’t still be in your review queue.

Mat, our head developer, therefore spent days his head burrowed in charts, pouring through data to establish what could be considered as “hard” and plotting a better distribution graph using us and himself as his first test subjects.

The Great Nincha Machine now takes into account several things when presenting words to review to you such as how well or little you know that word; if you’re reviewing on time or not to serve you up more balanced reviews. That way, during your reviews, you’ll see an even mix of words you’re less familiar and more comfortable with.

In short: This should make doing your reviews less like a tall mountain to climb and more of a pleasant ride with a few hikes and breaks along it.  What do you think of the changes?  That’s not all that’s been changed in the reviews!

Dealing more gradually with mistakes

Another pet-peeve your learners have mentioned is the way the Great Nincha Machine dealt with your mistakes, brutally downgrading you to zero stars, regardless of whether you’d actually forgotten the word or had just made a typo.

Well, the typo part has now been taken care of, so that shouldn’t be a problem anymore. In addition, our Great Nincha Machine now does its best to distinguish between words you’ve completely and entirely forgotten and those which have temporarily slipped your mind.  Each word you get wrong therefore now gets assessed to see if it needs to be shown to you again the next day, or if it can wait a few days to be reshown to you.

This should make our handling of mistakes a lot more flexible and, in the long term, mean you have less reviews coming back every day.
In short: no more seeing a word you got wrong in your reviews the next day, unless you really really can’t remember a thing about it!

There’s more planned

There are quite a few more improvements planned in the review department so expect more changes in the near future. We’re starting with these changes and are waiting for you to show us how you like them. We’re monitoring the reviews closely to make sure the Great Nincha Machine is behaving like it should and dealing with your reviews in the best way for you.

So please,  go do your reviews and tell us what you think of the new improved reviews! Tell us: What do you think of the words you’re seeing? Do you feel you’re seeing a more even mix of hard and not-so hard words for you? Do your reviews feel more like a walk in the park? Do the changes suit you?

Hello, tooltips!

Perhaps you’ve noticed these nice white boxes popping up everywhere, with Nincha, Baimei and Yocha telling you things? Your teachers and coaches were eager to help you out so we listened to their wishes. They added little tutorials that now appear the first time you perform certain action on Ninchanese to guide you and show you where everything is. How do you like being taken care like that? It makes first times easier, don’t you think?

More seasoned Nincha Learners also get to see the tutorials, but they can easily be skipped by clicking on the check mark. And who knows, there might be things you’ll be discovering to. Can you look me in the eye and tell me you know what ALL the bonuses do, for instance? Well, now you can: just read Nincha’s messages to you!

The Nincha Team’s favorite sport: Bug squash

As always, a few bugs were also squashed in this beta update. Our goal is for you to have a great, unhindered, Chinese learning experience and bugs don’t factor in well with that.

No more drunk PY/ EN indicator

Drinking on the job is a big no-no and our PY/EN indicator should have known that. It didn’t though, and some of you poor learners ran into it under the influence. It asked you to enter English, only to tell you that it wanted Pinyin, didn’t it? Or the opposite? It must have been a confusing period for you!

Guess what we learned? That the PY/EN indicator AND Chrome were drinking together and conspiring to bring you those confusing results. Good news, though, they’ve both entered an online self-paced AA program and are well on track to recovery.
In short: the PY/EN indicator will now show you nothing but the truth. It swears.

(p.s: we’re counting on you to report it if it starts hitting the bottle again)

See ALL 3 words when you start a new vocab stage

Some of you users only saw two instead of three words at the beginning of a stage; this won’t happen again.

These are the big changes in this week’s beta update! Do you like the improvements? Let us know in the comments or share your feelings by tagging us @ninchanese on Twitter!

Sarah and

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 The beta update that makes you go “oh no a typo” and then “oh yeah” appeared first on Ninchanese.

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.

The post Voice and stroke order animation update appeared first on Ninchanese.

Part 1 of the update: Improving your user experience

We pride ourselves on offering you wonderful learners a pleasant and intuitive way to learn Chinese on Ninchanese. In that regards, there are plenty of things we can improve and add to the beta to make your experience learning Chinese as smooth and enjoyable as possible. This is what we worked on:

See more clearly when you get something wrong

We’ve added a little nudge so you can notice better when you’re getting an answer wrong in the vocab stages. What do you think? Sometimes, it’s the little things that make the most difference.

Easier navigation in the app

We’ve added a handy little “next stage” button so you can easily navigate from one stage to the next without having to go back to the home screen each time. It makes moving from Nincha’s vocabulary stages to Yocha’s sentence-building stages to Baimei’s Speaking Stages a breeze. Give it a try!

A change to how our feedback system works

The feedback system has changed! Don’t worry, it remains as easy as ever to use; simply hit the feedback button on the left hand of the screen to send us a feedback message! We love getting feedback from you
What has changed is where your feedback messages go — and where you see the replies. Now, everything is neatly stored in the application, so you’ll simply need to log on to Ninchanese to see if your message was answered.

You can also access the different feedback messages you’ve left and the answers we’ve written to your feedback by going to the Feedback section directly. Enjoy!

Goodbye bugs!

We’ve also squashed a few bugs in Ninchanese:

• Your result screen in Ninchallenges now shows your real usernames, and doesn’t say “Sarah” anymore. Better, right? You can also click on your Ninchallengers’ name
• The notification email will no longer tell you your world rank is #O. We’re sorry about that, we didn’t mean to shame you or anything; it was just a glitch.
• No more 404 errors in the time attacks when you click on “back to selection”; you can navigate time attacks and their leaderboards easily, now!
• And all more little ones, not even worth mentioning anymore now that they’re gone

There’s more coming

A big chunk of our work has also been dedicated to getting Ninchanese ready to give you access to more content – and we’re almost there! Pretty soon, we’ll be giving our users access to worlds 2 and up; it’ll be an exciting step for Ninchanese and our Nincha learners! Our Kickstarter backers are the first to get early access to these worlds (and so can you, by pre-ordering Ninchanese now) and then the worlds will be accessible to our beta users. This will be happening end of October, so get ready for new stages to unlock!

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 New beta update! appeared first on Ninchanese.

What? When? Where?

The campaign goes live today at 11 am New York Time. We hope to see you there!

Head here to check out the campaign

We put together this Kickstarter campaign because we can’t do it without you. We need your help to allow Ninchanese to truly become the awesome Chinese learning app we know it can be. We need your support!

Why Kickstarter?

Ninchanese is a passion project for us. Jean-Rémi and I (Sarah) started working on Ninchanese three years ago. Now, we’re a small 3 person team – with Mathieu who jumped aboard last year – and we’re proud of what we’ve self-funded and achieved so far with Ninchanese.

We believe Ninchanese has great potential as a Chinese learning tool for Chinese learners everywhere. As you know, Ninchanese is now in beta (if you want an invite, sign up on Ninchanese.com!).

We would love to make Ninchanese accessible to everyone. Everyone deserves a chance to learn Chinese in a fun and cute environment! This is what led us to Kickstarter. We need your help us finish what we’ve started and take it even further. Help make Ninchanese purrrfect!

Support us

A Kickstarter is all or nothing: if we don’t reach our goal, we don’t get anything! It would mean the world to us if you could support us. How? By backing the project Ninchanese and helping spread the word.

We want to send a strong positive signal to show everyone the campaign has taken off and to inspire them to join. Please help us do that!

In short:

You want to know what happens next to Lupishu and Nincha in their adventure accross Ninchana? You want Ninchanese to keep growing? We do too! Kickstarter is the best way to get Ninchanese there!

So if you want to help, read no more and go to Kickstarter!

See you there!

A very excited Nincha Team

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Ninchanese combines addictive game mechanics, cute cats and efficient Chinese learning techniques to make learning Chinese a lot of fun! Now live on Kickstarter! 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.

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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.

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.

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