Please help us beta test our radical-based Chinese character curriculum!

[ABCsOfChinese]

Dear linguists, Sinologists, and students of Chinese:

My name is Nic and I’ve been following the community forums here for the past few months. I’m so impressed with the helpful and knowledgeable users here and I would LOVE to get honest feedback from serious students and informed teachers early on in our curriculum development. We already have about 700 users, but I've been quite disappointed with the lack of feedback from users about what they like, don't like, and what they find helpful or changes they'd like to see.

We are focused on teaching Chinese characters in a simple and game-like fashion. We teach the radicals and other components that form Chinese characters first, and then show how the components you've learned form characters. As you learn these basic components, you will “discover” all the Chinese characters that contain them, and when you have learned all the components that make up a particular Chinese character, you will “unlock” that character.

For hardcore students who have been studying Chinese for a long time, the idea of learning the radicals first might not sound entirely revolutionary. (Un)fortunately it wasn’t until after the hundreds of hours of research that went into designing this curriculum that I realized I had reinvented the wheel in some ways. It wasn’t until we started coding everything that I learned of Heisig, McNaughton and Wenlin. Let me explain how we’re different though:

In university in America my Chinese professors had never pointed out to us that Chinese characters were composed of a limited set of radicals and phonetic elements. For us, learning characters was simply a matter of memorizing the characters in the chapter by rote. It wasn’t until a few years later while living in Taiwan—after having taken a burnout break from rote memorization—that I suddenly started noticing the similar “parts” that some characters shared. Within 24 hours of that eureka realization I came to know of “radicals” (which wouldn’t you know were conveniently there in a chart on the first page of my Chinese dictionary I’d never used). I set myself to the task of learning all 214 traditional radicals and within a month I had mastered them—knowing the meaning, pronunciation, and how to write each of them. At that point the radicals were starting to jump out of characters at me. However, I was still encountering characters that contained “elements” which weren’t any of the 214 radicals. That’s where things started getting interesting for me.

I spent hundreds of hours dissecting thousands of characters, cataloging every time I encountered new elements, and then with the help of native speaking friends in Taiwan started cross-referencing characters to learn the meanings of these “elements”. Towards the end I was literally thumbing through dictionaries just to make sure I hadn’t overlooked anything. When it was all said and done, I discovered that there are a total of 400 components parts. Any Chinese character you can find can be broken down into these 400 basic components. That is to say, all Chinese characters are composed from this limited set of 400 elemental components. This is how ABCs of Chinese is different. We teach the entire set of 400 components, in detail, including their pronunciation, meaning and stylistic transformation through history. All our information for character breakdowns and component meanings are based on the Shuowen Jiezi.

Please try out the interactive demo on our homepage and then comment to help us improve (either in this thread or email me directly at abcsofchinese@gmail.com).

NOTE: Currently not compatible with Chrome. Please use Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer. Also, you will need to install the plugin Silverlight for the interactive exercises.

Website: www.ABCsOfChinese.com

“An Introduction to Chinese Characters” intro video:

Facebook: www.facebook.com/ABCsOfChinese

[Koxinga]

Also, you will need to install the plugin Silverlight for the interactive exercises.

This is a dealbreaker.

[siledouyaoai]

Is there a simplified version?

[Lu]

It looks beautiful. Lovely interface and a nice movie (although most students won't quite get it when they start out on the site, but well).

The pronunciation exercise asks me to write the pinyin. I write rén and it says it's wrong, ren is considered correct. Tones cannot just be left out, they are an inherent part of the language. You can have people type ren2 or rén or whatever works, but to mark rén as wrong is, well, not right, imo. Even if the program asks for the tone right below.

I see that you make little stories of the meaning of characters. These can be very useful as mnemonics, but it's important for students to know that 1) not all characters can be read like this, characters are usually not a rebus and 2) these are not necessarily the real/accepted etymology of the characters.

Also, do you know zhongwen.com and the paper version of it? Their approach is a bit similar, although zhongwen.com is a dictionary not really a learning tool.

The website and setup looks good and I'm sure it will be useful to people. Good luck!

[drencrom]

So it's only for traditional characters? I need simplified. Plus there are fewer radicals to learn.

Why are the videos all on youtube instead of youku? You know youtube is blocked in China, right?

[ABCsOfChinese]

@siledouyaoai, @drencrom: At the moment our curriculum is focused on the decomposition of traditional characters, so all of the learning exercises are focused on writing and recognizing the traditional form of the components. However in the Intro exercise for each component we do show the simplified form, along with the bronze and oracle versions. A good example for this is 金 (http://abcsofchinese.com/Writing/Exercises/180). In the future we will be adding simplified support so that the user can work with writing the simplified forms of the components.

[ABCsOfChinese]

Why are the videos all on youtube instead of youku? You know youtube is blocked in China, right?

I had completely overlooked this, drencrom. Thanks for bringing that to my attention!

[ABCsOfChinese]

@Lu

The pronunciation exercise asks me to write the pinyin. I write rén and it says it's wrong, ren is considered correct. Tones cannot just be left out, they are an inherent part of the language. You can have people type ren2 or rén or whatever works, but to mark rén as wrong is, well, not right, imo. Even if the program asks for the tone right below.

Thank you for the suggestion. Since it is difficult for several (new) users to type "rén", we had simplified the process so that the user can simply type "ren" and then hit 1,2,3 or 4 on their keyboard to select the tone. It's not actually necessary to click on the tone marks below. Thus, the user is typing "ren2". However, as you pointed out, if the user directly types "rén" that should automatically select the tone the same way as typing "ren2".

I see that you make little stories of the meaning of characters. These can be very useful as mnemonics, but it's important for students to know that 1) not all characters can be read like this, characters are usually not a rebus and 2) these are not necessarily the real/accepted etymology of the characters.

For the handful of "Riddle characters" we have in the Riddle exercise, these are based on our understanding of what we saw in the Shuowen Jiezi. We only chose a handful of examples for each component since we wanted to avoid arbitrarily making up our own mnemonics. If you look at the characters in the bottom "Index" tab of the Riddle exercise, we show all the characters that contain the current component, however we only show the decomposition and the meaning of each component, while avoiding "connecting the dots" and creating a fictional mnemonic for the user. At some point I hope to have the etymology for the most common 4000, but it takes an incredible amount of time to accurately research them.

Thanks for the feedback!

[ABCsOfChinese]

@Koxinga

Also, you will need to install the plugin Silverlight for the interactive exercises.

This is a dealbreaker.

Please bear with us as this is still in the proof of concept phase. When we first started coding this the development team and I decided that Silverlight was our best option since we wanted to avoid using Flash. However, Silverlight has begun to follow the same path as Flash and is falling out favor. We will soon be porting everything over to a more sustainable cross-platform compatible solution.

[chajadan]

When I got towards the end of the first demo, it told me to click the green tile or select the green arrow from the left. Only selecting the green arrow moved me forward in a usable way. Maybe the other option was just hung, and would have proceeded, but instead, it took so long I clicked replay out of antsy-ness to realize that's not useful to me.

--charlie

[ABCsOfChinese]

@chajadan

When I got towards the end of the first demo, it told me to click the green tile or select the green arrow from the left. Only selecting the green arrow moved me forward in a usable way

Charlie, thanks a lot for the bug report! I just tested out the demo (Demo Pt 1) and wasn't able to reproduce what you described. As you said, you can click on the green arrow in the left hand menu, or double-click the highlighted green tile on the globe. When I tried it just a moment ago both worked correctly. Also, double-clicking the tile should load at the same speed as clicking the green arrow. I'll keep an eye on it and see if anyone else is having the problem. Aside from the demo, once you sign in to "My Account" are you having the same problem with the globe?

[chajadan]

I just re-reproduced it here. I'm on Win7HomePrem SP1 using IE 10.0.9200.16540 with Silverlight 5.1.20125.0

[ABCsOfChinese]

Cheers! Thanks for checking that again! I don't have a Windows computer on hand but I'll ask my lead developer to check it out later today!

[Joseph Kimbrell]

I'd def. be interested for simplified. Love the post about how Silverlight is a dealbreaker