Lanya - new web site to learn Chinese

[Long Pan]

I haven't tested it, just read this article in today's China Daily. This is for beginner and the concept is that (I quote this article) "Learners only need to remember 354 basic words and 595 classified words and then practice them combining common sentences in daily life covering the fields of traffic, accommodation, catering, shopping, entertainment, tourism, sports and trade"

The website seems a bit slow (or it is me) and at first glance the architecture not so intuitive. Anyway they charge 30 USD for 35 days, or 5 USD for 5 days. Maybe some will find it usefull.

http://www.lnyabc.com/

[lokki]

Thanks for the link. It is on the slow side here too. And I agree about the structure.

On the one hand it seems a very ambitious project, offering to teach you Chinese from various source languages: English, French, German, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic - On the other hand the whole thing gives a very sloppy impression due to the poor level of the English and some (presumably all) of the other source languages.

That whimsical sentence you quote above "Learners only need to remember 354 basic ..." is just the beginning (EDIT:Oh, I now see that one was from the article, not from the site). On the next page there are gems like: "We have opened integrant course for free", "Get Trouble Answer timely", "How to give birth to the romance". I had a look at the French and Spanish pages, and they were even worse, totally unintelligible in some parts. They might have been computer-translated and published directly with no checking, except there are mistakes even computers wouldn't make.

And the promise "You can learn and speak freely common Chinese within 30 days." seems just a tad overoptimistic, even in an ad-speak context, whatever "speak freely" is supposed to mean.

I wouldn't expect their English or other languages to be perfect but surely it can't be that difficult to have the material checked by native speakers. If you hope to attract paying customers you should at least make it intelligible. I can't help wonder if the same careless sloppiness is present in the teaching material itself.

I won't be spending my money on this, but it could be worth keeping an eye on and add to the link collection.