Need Feedback for my newly developed Learn Mandarin Web Applicat

[Max82]

I just put online a web application for learning Mandarin and it would be great to receive some feedback about it.

Its a flash application and runs right in your browser and there are currently 40 lessons online. I spend the last weeks developing it and hope that it is a good way to learn Mandarin.

By the way, its free to use. I am constantly improving it and if you find something not working well please let me know.

All feedback is very welcome and please let me know how you like it.

Thank You!

http://www.l-lingo.com/en/learn-chinese-mandarin/

[Gnome]

It just looks and feels like an exact replica of Rosetta Stone. I got through the first lesson easy and couldn't do it anymore, but that's cause I work for Rosetta Stone and felt like I was just repeating lessons.

[trien27]

In the writing quiz portion: You show a picture of a woman, then there's a button "Show the answer", without letting the user choose an option for the correct answer or an option for the user to 'write' out the answer. Then there's two options after clicking show the answer: I was right, & I was wrong. What type of Writing quiz is this?!

The training portion is totally for a non-beginner, where it is implied that the user already know all those characters being seen or heard from the training and writing quiz. But your website seems to be for beginners?

This is definitely a wrong method to teach any language. Without knowing whether this is for a beginner or not, I dare not say more. Same thing with a picture of the man. What I need to say is: this is not enough if you're teaching any languages. You must let them learn from the beginning, not from the middle.

Learning Chinese takes time and patience, unlike learning English. In English, there's no single meaning associated with most of the letters, but in Chinese, each character has their own individual meaning or sometimes even more than one meaning.

The words "A man" and "A woman" is easy to learn in English, all you have to know is the meanings of three words: A, man & woman. In Chinese, you'd have to learn the meaning of "一,个,男,女, & 人". And then you'd have to learn the meanings of "一个" & "男人" & "女人".

Edited November 15, 2009 at 10:36 PM by trien27

[xianhua]

I was surprised to see 脚踏车 instead of 自行车, but then looked it up in MDBG which stated that it's used more in Taiwan. However, it's written in simplified Chinese on your site, so I feel a slight contradiction. Now, if someone comes back and says it isn't used much in Taiwan either, then you're in trouble.

[Gnome]

Yeah I agree with xianhua, I was very confused by the words you used for bicycle. Although I wouldn't say that your approach is bad as far as learning, because using pictures with sound and symbols can work, it is just a huge hurdle. Like I said before though, it looks exactly like Rosetta Stone, and they are now offering a web version called Totale which also has voice recognition, multiplayer games and native studio coaches. Good luck on your project, just remember you'll have some liability and copyright issues with your current version because it mimics their software almost exactly.

[abcdefg]

It would drive me crazy to actually try to use this for learning Chinese, but I did find one thing that I liked: namely the way you include the appropriate measure word 量词 when you introduce new vocabulary items. For example:

一辆汽车

一架飞机

一列火车

一只猫

一条鱼

一头牛

Edited November 15, 2009 at 11:48 PM by abcdefg

[Max82]

I just would like to thank all of you for your comments.

Concerning your comments on the Chinese language part, I will forward this to our Chinese translator in order to get that rectified.

On the confusion of the writing quiz. This is actually a very simple quiz based on a self evaluation approach. This means that when you hear the Chinese word and see the English translation, you take a pencil and paper and write this manually. When you finish you show the correct answer and compare it to how you wrote it. This way you really learn to write the Chinese character rather than typing it on a keyboard. By the way, there are help buttons in each Quiz explaining you how the Quizzes work.

Thank you for the comparison with Rosetta Stone but our approach is totally different. As far as I know Rosetta Stone is based on a Total Immersion approach, i.e. there are no translations into your mother tongue at all. In our App you find translations all over the place. Our lessons also follow a total different teaching style, e.g. we first introduce single words which are then repeated two times in sentence constructions. I think accidentally we use similar words in the first lesson but when you look beyond this you will find a totally different approach. But thank you for pointing this out and we keep an eye on it to make sure it is not getting too similar.

It would be great to receive more feedback. Thank You.