The mobile space is very much an exploratory scene at the moment. There are apps such Tencent’s Intelligent Eye and Pleco’s Optical Character Recognition, not even mentioning the awesome dictionary apps, of which Hanping is my favourite on Android.

Mandarin Madness is a relatively new app on the scene that aims to make learning Chinese vocabulary easy and fun at the same time. I downloaded it and tested it out for a review on my HTC Desire Android phone. First I’ll just give an overview of the app, then I’ll leave my thoughts.

Initial Impressions

The art and sound design is consistent and inviting. This often one my biggest gripes when it comes to learning applications in that the creators/developers often overlook the whole package of creating instructional programs. Art and design is definitely something that aids a learner in interacting with the program (or at least not chasing them away!). The pictures are solid and often cutesy, but not in the way that it will put off the alpha-male-Hello-Kitty-hating jock. The sound, although not perfect, serves its function.

How it Works

The app has several vocabulary lists, ranging from animals, to colours, to stationery, to clothes and more. Usually about 10-12 different words surrounding a theme. As seen in the screenshot, words come down from the top and you have to choose the correct corresponding picture/icon below before it reaches the bottom, otherwise you lose a life. They “train” the vocabulary association by starting only with one character (along with pronunciation which is sounded out as it starts dropping) and one picture. In doing so you know that 狗 is pronounced gǒu and is linked to a dog.

After each vocabulary item is correctly associated, the level ends. They then add more pictures below (four is the max), from then on levels either become quicker, or they remove either the sound or character, so you can learn both associations. It keeps on speeding up until it reaches level 15.

The next stage is a where the words sort of bounce around in random directions. It does not go straight down like the first stage. Sometimes the characters even turn upside down. The final stage is where you have to arrange the icons at the bottom to correspond to four characters coming down from the top before they reach the bottom.

Linguistic Approach

Mandarin Madness is language agnostic. This means that the app is meant to be used by anyone, regardless of native tongue. This means, for someone like me, there’s no English anywhere in this app. Associations between sound + character to meaning is mapped by the picture that it provides. Thus, it’s a “natural” approach to word acquisition. This is not necessarily the better approach, as it depends on the kind of learner. Furthermore, there is little explicit instruction in the app concerning grammar, word structure or any such sorts and thus mainly focuses on vocabulary acquisition.

I find idea of a language agnostic app quite interesting and actually really cool, but it comes with its disadvantages. It’s really hard to help with meaning negotiation when it comes to learning words. You have to rely on the pictures to explain what the word means. This is really tough and perhaps one of the app’s biggest challenges. Some words work quite easily, like numbers, colors or animals. Objects that are easily defined by a picture.

However, other words, such as Peking Duck, Spring Festival Couplets and Lion Dance (舞狮) in the Chinese culture vocabulary group are hard to understand completely. I have some previous knowledge of Chinese, thus I knew what they meant, but without that, how does one know? Abstract words will be out of the scope for this app.

An uniquely Chinese challenge comes up too. There are other versions of this game for Spanish and English. They work fine, but for Chinese, due to it having no grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence, ie. it doesn’t use an alphabet, its harder to understand the pronunciation of Chinese without an idea of how the romanization looks like. Pinyin (or Zhuyin) serves a function to mediate learning the actual pronunciation, without it, you’re kind of lost, unless you already know it to some extent. New learners would have trouble understanding Chinese pronunciation. There are also no indication of tones, or even the existence of them! Many incorrect inferences will be made by unsuspecting learners.

User Experience and Game Design

Due to it being a touch screen app, pressing the icons to select the character is quite easy and fits the style of learning. However, there are some other things in the app that bugs me. Some things that would put me off from using the app completely.

One of these is the fact that during a stage, with its increasing difficulty in levels, there is no way to “save” a level once you’ve passed one, besides actually losing all your lives. If I want to stop the game and not redo all the previous levels, I have to literally make myself lose. Just wait for the words to scroll past my screen. Maybe this is an oversight, but it really hampers the flow and accessibility of the app. Due this, the app feels unnecessarily repetitive and chore-like. I can’t just quickly play a level while waiting in a queue.

Also, when you choose a wrong word, red crosses cover all the words for a brief second or two. During the higher levels, when the words move down quickly, you can’t press the “crossed” out buttons, until the red cross fades away. This makes it almost impossible to correct a mistake at such a high speed and you inevitably lose a life.

Other factors are due to the language agnostic approach to the app. There are no instructions. Nowhere. This makes it very hard for the user to understand what is going on and what buttons mean. This is where clever user experience design can overcome this hurdle, but it doesn’t quite make it, especially on the last stage, where you have align icons to the words that are dropping down. It took me at least 4 deaths to understand what’s going on.

Maybe I missed this point, but for some reason you get points. There is no indication for what these points are there for, besides just for show.

Final Thoughts

Mandarin Madness has definitely some interesting ideas, like the agnostic approach, vocabulary sets and arcade-like gameplay, ones which I feel can be quite beneficial in making a fun interactive learning game on your phone. For now, there are some serious challenges in the usage of the app and some hurdles that need to be jumped before I will recommend this app as a permanent addition to a Chinese learner’s, especially beginner learner’s smartphone. Some of these hurdles are the disadvantages of a language agnostic approach, user experience hiccups and not addressing the unique properties of Chinese vocabulary.

+ Language Agnostic
+ Fun and interactive
+ Great Art
- No instructions
- User Experience unwelcoming
- Does not address unique properties of Chinese vocabulary clearly enough

There are currently 4 episodes online. I quite like the second episode. Check out the Shakespeare soliloquy in Chinese and the fail of the instant translator app. The Chinese has a strong Taiwanese accent to it, which isn’t that bad if you’re used to watching Taiwanese soaps or dramas. Otherwise it’s not that hard to follow, especially with the English subtitles helping you along. Enjoy!

That’s me in the checkered top talking to the professors. You may notice the person in the forefront with earphones around his neck, that’s my twin brother (we both work in the same lab. He’s doing research into social networks and information overload).

The conversation with the professors went quite smoothly in the end. I explained most of research, how I want to help learners Chinese learn characters better and how I think that radicals are an important of the Chinese script (they would know of course!). I left out some other stuff, like flashcards and spaced repetition, but I’m glad as even that in English is hard to explain to people!

They asked if I have something to demo. I showed them my HanziJS decomposition tool. It worked fine, but then they asked to try the character 姜. When I saw it, I immediately recognized seeing this character before and knew that this character would test the data I got from Gavin Grover. It returned this:

Woops! The top part should be  ⺷! But here’s the interesting thing. I did a bit more research into this. The top component should actually be 羊 as this was part of the historic development of 姜. However, here’s the cool part, ⺷  is to 羊 as 氵 is to 水. Meaning that it is the form of the radical that is not stand-alone and only occurs fixed with a character.

So how does one actually decode 姜? I asked this question on the Chinese Stack Exchange. Technically it should be ⺷ + 女, because when 羊 as a radical occurs at the top of the character, it should  be ⺷. In my opinion, I think one should stick to showing 羊, because it works as familiar phonetic radical that aids in the pronunciation 姜 (Jiāng) as it has the same rhyme.

The LWC is an annotated linguistic 100-million word corpus containing 5.1 million messages from Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblogging service. It’s freely available online at http://lwc.daanvanesch.nl/.

I’m a sucker for context lately. Whenever I want to see how a word is used, I go straight to Jukuu.com, instead trying to find the meaning boundaries with a dictionary. This tool by Daan will be an awesome new arsenal in contextual information, especially colloquial online writing. There are some useful stat pages as well, like a frequency list. It will be interesting to see how this differs other frequency lists. I already see a word, 分享, popping in at number 50 that you won’t find in other corpuses that high up, like Jun Da’s fiction corpus. 分享 means to share. You’ll see it everywhere on Weibo and social networking websites. Almost like retweet from Twitter.

Have a look around and start exploring. I’ll bet you’ll find something interesting.

I wanted to listen to everything, from the start. Looking back now, what a dumbass mistake. I started with some of the newbie dialogues, like “How have you Been?”. I found it so slow and boring. I gave up after listening to two podcasts.

Silly me. Now last week I decided to check out ChinesePod again to see if I can get into it. I went straight to intermediate. Didn’t even touch newbie or elementary. I don’t get enough listening/speaking practice here in South Africa, so it’s something I need to work on. The intermediate level is excellent for me. The density of Chinese, mixed with the excellently timed English help from John is brilliant. Now I’m kicking myself for only doing this now.

I’m putting the podcasts on my phone now and my morning walk to the lab on campus is exactly the right time for my walk.

The video above is his “last” video with John. I’m impressed, but for more than just his ability that he acquired in 3 months.

Before his Mandarin mission, I was skeptical about his program and felt he was arrogant and had a dismissive attitude towards me and other commenters. The Mandarin missions was close to home as this a language I have learned myself, so seeing his progress made me realize just how much effort he put in.

What I saw from other people, on reddit, on his videos, on his blogs, wherever, was that no matter what Benny did, people consistently bashed him.

Yes, he did not make his initial goal of C1.
Yes, reading Chinese is still a big part that he has to acquire.
Yes, his accent is not hundred percent.
Yes, he stumbles now and then and his first video was painstakingly slow.

BUT, seriously, look at what he has done, he managed to spend every single day working hard. Extremely hard to achieve the C1 goal and gained some good conversational Chinese in the process. That’s the whole point. Aim high. Reading Chinese will come with more exposure and accent is a problem that can be fixed.

I admire his tenacity, perseverance, patience and most of all courage to face such intense public scrutiny. That is what I learned the most from following his Mandarin mission and have gained a lot of respect, because of it. If it was me, I’d have crawled into a ball a long time ago. But, I feel, we have a responsibility to promote and uplift each other, even when we have extreme cases such as Benny, who makes “outrageous” claims.

I have long since tried to look past the content of people’s goals and actions, but rather try and understand the attempt behind it. This is another case. The beauty is in the attempt, not the content. Well done Benny, I applaud you and hope your travels in China will be a fruitful experience and reap the benefits of all the hard work you’ve put in in the last three months.

It got 650, 000 views on it’s first day on Youku. I’m seriously impressed. Feichang Fresh sings some of my favourite Chinese songs. Now Antoine has created another awesome Chinese show!? Who are these guys. Their Chinese is amazing. The show itself is also really good, with romance, friendships, dreams and music. Now if these laowai are not inspiring, then I don’t know what is.

Example of decomposing the character 赶

To avoid being overly technical:

 Hanzi is a Chinese character dictionary lookup (still in development) and radical decomposition module for Node.js.

It was created using the Node.js coding language. This is for the coders and language learners as I think this could benefit many people out there. It is still very early in its development cycle. So it has a few limitations:

1) Can only lookup one character at a time.

2) Only breaks down the character into two parts.

3) Some characters break down into REALLY weird glyphs, which can’t be shown by the average browser.

4) Some character decompositions show numbers instead of their components. This is how the data is structured. It will be solved soon. This is especially apparent in more complex characters and 繁体字 (traditional characters).

5) The decompositions aren’t all radicals. They are “parts” rather than radicals. Well most of it. I will set out to show all the radicals eventually.

6) When decomposing a radical it displays an “undefined” next to it. Will remove it in the next update.

But, hey it’s a start in the right direction. So try it out at HanziJS.com. I still have lots of development to do on this module, but it works good enough already to help you guys out. For more a technical post head to my personal blog.

It was created by Steven Daniels, who is no stranger to the online Mandarin learning community, as he is behind Lingomi too. I’ve only recently started using 3000Hanzi, and so far I’m impressed. I see a good future for 3000Hanzi as Steven is diligent developer and learner. His blog shows that. I’m not going to an in-depth review of the site as this only an introduction.

Here’s a video that explains more:

In summary, in the words of Steven:

What is it: a tool to help learner read Chinese.
See it in action on youtube or youku.
How to get it: It’s available as part of 3000 Hanzi’s Basic subscription.

 Chinese is a logographic language

A logographic language is where a grapheme represents a word or morpheme. This is opposed to an alphabetic language like English, where a grapheme represents a phoneme. In less linguistic terms, Chinese characters are words, but letters in an alphabet are sounds. This is where a big confusion comes in. People see Chinese characters as letters. That’s why you get the picture above, which supposedly spells someones name. Now you all know, you can’t “spell” someones name letter for letter in Chinese. There’s a bogus alphabet that many tattoo artists use. If you ever want to get a Chinese tattoo with someone’s name, get it in an alphabetic script please! Or just in the language that it’s already written in. No need to force a name into another language.

Chinese characters aren’t mystical objects of eternal wisdom

Yes, Chinese characters do have a lot of meaning behind them. Sometimes one character can represent a lot, like 道, but for most of the part it’s just another word. 安, 爱, 和, peaceful, love and harmonious respectfully, are all candidates of Chinese tattoos I’ve seen before. Would you tattoo those words in English? If so, then by all means get the Chinese character equivalent to add some spice to your tattoo.

Advice for getting a Chinese tattoo

1) Don’t. Seriously reconsider your choice. You have seen Engrish.com right? If you get a Chinese tattoo and you get it wrong, you’ll be a walking joke to Chinese people, the same way we laugh at bad English in China.

2) If you really want one. Make sure what you want is correct. If you want a sentence or idea, then check it with a native speaker of Chinese. While you are at it, ask them if it’s weird to have a tattoo of it.

3) Learn the Chinese language first. I know, this might be a bit much for just getting a tattoo, but believe me, you gain a lot more respect for your tattoo after you’ve learned the culture and language.

Would you consider getting a Chinese tattoo? Do you already have one? I’ve been considering for some time now, but it must something that is not cheesy, probably an idiom and/or something that means a lot to me. Then again, thinking about it is a lot different than actually getting one.