Need some help with my master's thesis

[MasterLi]

Hi,

I am looking for people to help me out by doing the course I designed for HSK 4 and HSK 5 learners on Memrise. I am studying a master's and writing my thesis on westerners learning Chinese characters, I plan to use anonymised data from the course as part of this thesis. Here is a link http://www.memrise.c...one-characters/, please don't write any mems for the time being.

Thanks for your time everyone. If you have any questions about Chinese, university in China or HSK 6 (which I passed last year) please ask - even if you don't have time to take part in the study.

[roddy]

Tell us about the design of the course.

[MasterLi]

It is just 60 characters that appear both on the HSK4 and HSK5 lists. The participants will learn the characters and then perform proficiency tests based on the meaning or pronunciation. I initially want to analyse which characters are easier for foreigners to learn and later plan to make some changes to the course to see if it can be more effective. No profits will be gained from the experiment and none of the data will be used for any other purpose than the write-up of my study.

[Demonic_Duck]

How are you accounting for the fact that learners will inevitably already know some of the characters better than others?

Edit: also discovered a small error, 喝 should be hē not hé.

Edit 2: also 扔 should be rēng not rèng.

Edit 3: and are these really HSK 4-5 level words? Most of them seem far too basic. (Sorry about the multiple edits, I'm looking through this stuff as I type).

Edit 4: 逛 guàng not guāng.

[MasterLi]

Hi,

Thanks for the feedback and corrections. Those mistakes did not exist on the more relevant pronunciation level but were careless all the same; if you see any more let me know.

They are all HSK 4 and 5 words, they are all on both the HSK4 and HSK5 Hanban lists. I appreciate that some will be easier than others but hope that if I get enough people to study enough characters I will be able to find definite trends. Also after I make changes to the course I will be able to see what effects these changes have.

Thanks for taking part.

[XiongNu]

Most people here will know these characters

[MasterLi]

As I said all of these words are on the HSK 4 and 5 lists but if you think they are too easy for you then don't bother.

Thanks for trying it and thanks for the feedback

[陳德聰]

I think it would be appropriate for you to express who your target demographic is for this "course" you've designed. In theory, wouldn't you want to have a way for people to indicate that it is a character they already know? Some characters that appear in the HSK 4 and 5 lists most likely appear in some beginner textbooks as well.

If you're only looking at stand-alone characters, is it something to do with 形声字? I'm super curious now about what this data could really be useful for.

[MasterLi]

I am reluctant to give too much away while the experiment is still ongoing, but I promise will post a link to it all when I have finished my write-up (the paper might not get translated into English for some time but i have been asked to blog about it in English so can post that first).

I included characters from HSK4 and 5 lists with the hope of getting more people to take part, I appreciate that some characters might be too easy for some users but I think it is simpler to just sort this out when I have the data; I could plot them against how common they are for example. Having said that - if you can really be bothered there is a way to opt out of learning characters you already know, look at the level and click 'ignore' and then you can check the ones you don't want to learn then click 'save'.

Thanks for getting involved.

[alanmd]

I am not sure what you mean by:

60 characters that appear both on the HSK4 and HSK5 lists

The HSK lists are cumulative, so all HSK4 characters are also HSK5 characters. Also, quite a few of your characters also appear at lower levels (so an HSK 4 or 5 learner would already know these characters), and some only appear on the HSK 5. Here is a breakdown (made using this tool http://www.hskhsk.com/analyse.html ) of the first appearance of each of your characters by HSK level (using the 2012 word lists published by Hanban)

HSK1: 叫 钱 喝 块 冷 猫 菜

HSK2: 等 题 玩 忙 站 慢 课 累 零

HSK3: 把 像 被 放 种 接 花 假 轻 船 脸 楼 脚 搬 腿 疼 河 碗

HSK4: 抱 掉 底 使 份 醒 破 俩 深 挺 脱 苦 扔 糖 笨 批 躺 擦 敲 汗 抬 逛

HSK5: 顿 暗 撞 吵 硬 猪 圆

I noticed by looking at http://hskhsk.python...skchars20102012 that the characters I have listed as "HSK5" above were at HSK level 4 or below in 2010, so maybe you were using the old 2010 lists and you meant that all characters were at HSK4 level or below? In this case none of the characters would be new to someone who had taken HSK 4 and was studying for HSK 5.