Adam Ehrlich
Member
Is there something in the works for game-style learning? Sometimes, its kind of dry learning chraracters from flashcards. It would be great if you could somehow incorporate some kind of game to make it a little more fun.
Games
- Thread starter Adam Ehrlich
- Start date
Nothing immediately in the works, since our focus for 4.0 is on the core flashcard system (we're revamping our current test types to take care of some obvious weaknesses like the 4-character limit in fill-in-the-blanks, but aren't planning to add any major new ones), but once that's out we would like to add some new test types.
To be honest, though, we have yet to see a Chinese testing 'game' idea that we like well enough to put into our app - a lot of them focus on learning single characters, and pedagogically we think character-focused Chinese learning is a bad idea + aren't inclined to do much to encourage people to study that way. (but that doesn't mean we can't come up with our own games that focus on the sort of things we think people ought to be studying)
To be honest, though, we have yet to see a Chinese testing 'game' idea that we like well enough to put into our app - a lot of them focus on learning single characters, and pedagogically we think character-focused Chinese learning is a bad idea + aren't inclined to do much to encourage people to study that way. (but that doesn't mean we can't come up with our own games that focus on the sort of things we think people ought to be studying)
Shun
状元
If I may chime in on this point, I think it's difficult to judge a learning strategy without having practiced it for at least a few months. Unless the entire learning process over the long term is thoroughly understood, which it currently isn't, it is impossible to make an objective statement in favor of word-based or mixed word- and character-based learning. I can only say I was surprised by the advantages mixed character- and word-based learning has brought me. So from that I also can't infer that mixed word- and character-based learning is necessarily superior. (and of course, learners can differ greatly, too)
Fair enough, but I'm not personally enough of a believer in it to roll out a new flashcard game or whatever that encourages it. I'm bothered by the amount of attention characters are given in early Chinese learning specifically (so many systems trying to teach people their first bit of Chinese through useless single characters) and very much want to avoid doing anything to contribute to that at Pleco.
This is an interesting discussion, and I wish that that I could say something clever to contribute to it. Learning a language as perversely complicated as Chinese has many aspects, and my own feeling is that anything that you personally find fascinating is helpful. Fortunately, the language is also insanely rich, and there are plenty of ways to get hooked on something. If you feel that characters are strange and beautiful (as I do), then go for it and learn characters. If the mystique of characters leaves you cold, ignore them and learn words instead. Obviously I agree with Mike that one should not pursue character in the hope that this will somehow lead to fluency. This is a dream. But on the other hand, knowing characters will not hurt you. And it will definitely also help you to learn actual real life words, so it's good, isn't it?
I think that a great area for you guys to pioneer would be to apply the concepts of gamification to learning grammatical structures. Most dictionaries and textbooks focus solely on characters and definition.
I've tested several apps in regards to flashcards and I'd say the best implementation (i've seen so far) of full screen game implementation is Memrise. They do a good job of providing pictures and when it comes to learning the pinyin (mostly useless in opinion) they do a good job of tokenizing the words/letters and having you arrange them in the correct order. I think they've also done this with simple sentences which is very helpful.
You could do something like:
"如果你非要去，就去吧。“ and then prompt with "__你非要去，_去吧。"
A：“如果...就“
B：”虽然...但是"
C：等等
Another idea would be to do some implementation of a vocal test, where you prompt with a character or phrase/sentence and people say it and then translate it to characters. You could use the voice to text already built in.
You already have a lot of good examples from the multiple dictionaries but if you wanted more current examples of curated context you could look at integrating with "The Chairmans Bao" to source examples/content.
I do agree that learning a character by itself while has some inherent value, it's really not an efficient way to learn it outside of context...but sometimes (ex: like for a university exam/HSK) it's a necessary evil due to imposed constraints.
I've tested several apps in regards to flashcards and I'd say the best implementation (i've seen so far) of full screen game implementation is Memrise. They do a good job of providing pictures and when it comes to learning the pinyin (mostly useless in opinion) they do a good job of tokenizing the words/letters and having you arrange them in the correct order. I think they've also done this with simple sentences which is very helpful.
You could do something like:
"如果你非要去，就去吧。“ and then prompt with "__你非要去，_去吧。"
A：“如果...就“
B：”虽然...但是"
C：等等
Another idea would be to do some implementation of a vocal test, where you prompt with a character or phrase/sentence and people say it and then translate it to characters. You could use the voice to text already built in.
You already have a lot of good examples from the multiple dictionaries but if you wanted more current examples of curated context you could look at integrating with "The Chairmans Bao" to source examples/content.
I do agree that learning a character by itself while has some inherent value, it's really not an efficient way to learn it outside of context...but sometimes (ex: like for a university exam/HSK) it's a necessary evil due to imposed constraints.
All possible, the biggest issue with a lot of these is that they would seem to require us to develop / curate flashcard content ourselves, which is thus far something we've tried to steer clear of since we don't really have a good model for funding it (with our flashcards being a one-time purchase) - all of the other resources you mention are subscription-based. We have toyed with offering a subscription package at some point (probably two, one an all-inclusive thing and another an optional supplement on top of your existing paid / permanent purchases) and if we ever did we'd certainly want to get into content like this but for now while we are planning to add support for cloze-based flashcards it'll be drawing from our existing example sentence pool (or user-created examples) rather than having carefully chosen sentences / multiple choices / etc like this.
Voice-to-text for Chinese learning unfortunately doesn't work very well - we don't get the raw recognized syllables, in fact most Chinese voice recognition algorithms aren't even designed to supply those but instead look at the statistical likelihood of a particular word in context (and with a combination of syllables the least different from what it thinks it heard). Certainly theoretically possible to develop a system for that but the commercial applications beyond vocabulary testing are pretty small - much easier to spend millions of dollars developing a system to let you ask your phone what the weather's like
Voice-to-text for Chinese learning unfortunately doesn't work very well - we don't get the raw recognized syllables, in fact most Chinese voice recognition algorithms aren't even designed to supply those but instead look at the statistical likelihood of a particular word in context (and with a combination of syllables the least different from what it thinks it heard). Certainly theoretically possible to develop a system for that but the commercial applications beyond vocabulary testing are pretty small - much easier to spend millions of dollars developing a system to let you ask your phone what the weather's like
I think that something that would be really helpful might be a kind of.... reminder feature? Using notifications or something similar. I believe a lot of people would review their flashcards more often if they could be reminded at least once per day, or multiple times per day, to go into Pleco and review the flashcards...
I would also say a feature/ability to set goals might be cool. Not exactly fun as a game, but still a good way to keep studying.
I think goals help a lot. I have been driven by goals in the last 3 years. Mostly for Pleco my goals are just to keep finishing all the SRS flashcards everyday, which is about 200. Also statistics wise, it is to learn about 10 new words per day in average.
Not sure what kind of goals would be relevant, but I think that could be something to explore.
I think goals help a lot. I have been driven by goals in the last 3 years. Mostly for Pleco my goals are just to keep finishing all the SRS flashcards everyday, which is about 200. Also statistics wise, it is to learn about 10 new words per day in average.
Not sure what kind of goals would be relevant, but I think that could be something to explore.
Goal tracking is definitely part of our plans; reminder notifications I kind of have an aesthetic problem with, I personally hate hate hate it when apps pester me with notifications and I'm naturally reluctant to put anything into the app that bugs me that much. (even if it was off by default) So it would take a pretty overwhelming amount of user demand for a notification reminder feature before I'd consider adding one.
I liked your message very much. Thank you, marcelbdt.
I tend to combine the learning of "words" with its study, which inevitably leads me to other "words", and to the characters, the building stones, some of them made themselves from other building blocks.
Chinese seems to some learners "perversely complicated" and "insanely rich" because it is a language genealogically and tipologically very different from the ones they are familiar with. It's easy to forget this simple fact. Learners that remember this obvious fact find it easier to include Chinese in the scope of their linguistic experience, and become familiar more readily with what at first made no sense to them.
Which can make such richness a mixed blessing, if you get hooked on too many things at the same time.
"You shall know a word by the company it keeps". But, what does "word" refer to in Chinese? Some linguists say it doesn't refer to any thing; the rest don't agree on what it refers to.
I tend to combine the learning of "words" with its study, which inevitably leads me to other "words", and to the characters, the building stones, some of them made themselves from other building blocks.
Last edited: