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Apologies for shilling, but give us a try - this is exactly the problem we're trying to help people with: http://blog.memrise.com/2011/03/why-chinese-is-gettin

Apologies for shilling, but give us a try - this is exactly the problem we're trying to help people with: http://blog.memrise.com/2011/03/why-chinese-is-getting-easier-and.html http://blog.memrise.com/2011/03/why-chinese-is-getting-easie...

aquarin 15y ago
How many people have learned Chinese using you method?
- gregdetre 15y ago
  We're still young, so we've only had a few thousand people try us out for Chinese. Of those, a good number have learned hundreds of characters or more. One caveat - until recently, we've only really tackled the problem of reading characters. We've just started to introduce approaches for learning the pinyin and pronunciation, but they're not as polished yet. It's going to be a little while before we tackle writing - I'd try Skritter for that.
klbarry 15y ago
Awesome site! Any idea how long until you get official support for Korean? I saw some cool user generated stuff, but it's not useful without audio pronunciation.
xiaoma 15y ago
I apologize for any offense, but that post is riddled with things that give me the impression the author himself doesn't really understand Chinese that well. For starters, the vast majority of words are two or more syllables. Even when individual characters are a distinct word, they often have multiple meanings depending on context. There just isn't a simple 1-1 mapping of characters to "meanings". I'm a fan of Heisig's RTK system, which it looks like you borrowed from heavily, but its main utility is building a scaffold to assist with writing before getting the sufficient practice to do it naturally. However using the system for reading is a horrible waste of time since reading things in context is one of the few ways of learning the collocations and general diction patterns necessary to be a functional user of a language. The bit about only needing 2000 characters is also clearly BS. Even an 11 year old elementary school student will read far more than that many (though the number they're required to write is lower especially in the first few grades. In another post on the same site, "Why is Mandarin so incredibly easy to learn?", I read the following: >To be an undergraduate at a Chinese university you need to know about 5,000 words This is 100% absolutely false. The popular red Oxford E-C/C-E dictionary contains well over a hundred thousand entries, and a typical undergrad will know nearly all of them as well as many other words not in the dictionary. Learning a language is a major undertaking and this kind of blog post is really doing everyone a disservice. Edit: Personally I've had experience learning over half a dozen languages to various levels, including Chinese. In my former work in Taiwan, I dealt customers almost exclusively in Mandarin for 3+ years. I can't claim to be a language expert, but I am familiar with what it takes to be functional in one. Learning a language is a major task. For some idea of what's involved, check out this book written by one of the most successful polyglots of the modern era: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2538379 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2538379

aquarin 15y ago

How many people have learned Chinese using you method?

gregdetre 15y ago
We're still young, so we've only had a few thousand people try us out for Chinese. Of those, a good number have learned hundreds of characters or more. One caveat - until recently, we've only really tackled the problem of reading characters. We've just started to introduce approaches for learning the pinyin and pronunciation, but they're not as polished yet. It's going to be a little while before we tackle writing - I'd try Skritter for that.

klbarry 15y ago

Awesome site! Any idea how long until you get official support for Korean? I saw some cool user generated stuff, but it's not useful without audio pronunciation.

xiaoma 15y ago

I apologize for any offense, but that post is riddled with things that give me the impression the author himself doesn't really understand Chinese that well. For starters, the vast majority of words are two or more syllables. Even when individual characters are a distinct word, they often have multiple meanings depending on context. There just isn't a simple 1-1 mapping of characters to "meanings". I'm a fan of Heisig's RTK system, which it looks like you borrowed from heavily, but its main utility is building a scaffold to assist with writing before getting the sufficient practice to do it naturally. However using the system for reading is a horrible waste of time since reading things in context is one of the few ways of learning the collocations and general diction patterns necessary to be a functional user of a language. The bit about only needing 2000 characters is also clearly BS. Even an 11 year old elementary school student will read far more than that many (though the number they're required to write is lower especially in the first few grades. In another post on the same site, "Why is Mandarin so incredibly easy to learn?", I read the following: >To be an undergraduate at a Chinese university you need to know about 5,000 words This is 100% absolutely false. The popular red Oxford E-C/C-E dictionary contains well over a hundred thousand entries, and a typical undergrad will know nearly all of them as well as many other words not in the dictionary. Learning a language is a major undertaking and this kind of blog post is really doing everyone a disservice. Edit: Personally I've had experience learning over half a dozen languages to various levels, including Chinese. In my former work in Taiwan, I dealt customers almost exclusively in Mandarin for 3+ years. I can't claim to be a language expert, but I am familiar with what it takes to be functional in one. Learning a language is a major task. For some idea of what's involved, check out this book written by one of the most successful polyglots of the modern era: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2538379 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2538379