Interactive digital book to learn Chinese. No more ni hao & ni hao ma

[Jillina]

*** Update: All the content is now open to everyone. You do not need to sign up. Simply go to the website (rabbitasbooks.com) and click DEMO on the menu. We kindly ask you to provide us some feedback after trying the first page. To return, you will get the access to the second page and continue reading. We will start making improvement based on your feedback. So please let us develop something that will truely help you to learn Chinese. Thank you, thank you and thank you! ***

 

Hi dear Chinese learners,

 

My name is Jill and a friend of mine and myself are currently developing an interactive digital book to learn Chinese. We are tired of hearing ni hao as the first lesson and we have decided to try an innovative way to teach Chinese. 

 

Basically, you will be reading a children's book in Chinese and you are able to click on every word on the book. Once you click the word you'd like to learn, the menu will show up on the left hand side. It includes vocab/phrases, lesson, practice and extension. 

 

Vocab/Phrases

You will be able to listen to the audio of the word and learn how it is pronounced. You will also see both traditional and simplified Chinese characters as well as its meaning in English if it can be translated directly. 

 

Lesson

It can be presented as a video of PDF file. You will learn the way the word is used in the book. And the lesson focuses on daily life conversation. So you can learn a lot of useful words.

 

Practice

Once you finish the lesson, you can check what you have learnt

 

Extension

This the extension of the lesson. You may learn other usages of the same word or an extended knowledges of the word taught in the lesson. It can be either a video or PDF file as well.

 

The goal obviously is to make Chinese learning a bit more fun. Reading is one of the best ways to improve your language. And we have put everything you need from a book. So try it out.

 

To get a free sample, please go to our website: rabbitasbooks.com

 

Keep learning!

 

Regards,

Jill

 

[Leslie Frank]

Cautionary tale:

 

I'm always curious to see how others teach a language, so I thought I'd try this out.

 

So far, not a very good experience.

 

They wasted no time to get you to subscribe--no other way to get access to the "trial" sampler, but while it's lickety-split for them to get your info (they sent me an email right away to confirm its validity), they are dragging their feet to access their so-called trial sample. I haven't seen hide nor hair of it yet and it's been well over 24 hours since they sent me the validation email.

 

And btw, the free trial is different from the "full trial", where you'd have to fork over $1.

 

What's $1, you might ask? It's the principle. The OP made no mention of this "full trial" that you pay for. But there is that free trial sampler, right? (You might say.) I obviously can't answer that since, as I said earlier, I have yet to see it. I'm no longer dismissive of other companies that actually give a true free trial period, not to mention some apps that allow you free access to their learning app to use however long you want until you decide you want more, higher levels.

 

Maybe I'm not giving them the benefit of the doubt and need to give them some more time but in their response to my validating my email, there is only mention that I would be getting the trial, not that it would take a certain amount of time.

[thelearninglearner]

I don't see a point to "send me a free trial" 

Just give it to me on the site. And no, I'm not going to bother paying anything for a "full trial" 

 

If I don't like the trial, can I request my $1 back? Because if I'm buying, I'd like a refund policy

[Jan Finster]

On 3/8/2021 at 1:14 PM, Jillina said:

We are tired of hearing ni hao as the first lesson and we have decided to try an innovative way to teach Chinese. 

 

What is wrong with nihao? If I learned Arabic, I would probably like to learn the greetings first..

 

On 3/8/2021 at 1:14 PM, Jillina said:

you will be reading a children's book in Chinese

 

Who is this book aimed at? Children? Then good! Adults??? Why does everybody think adults enjoy reading children's books? They are aweful! How, about anime or a picture book with images from around China?

 

4 hours ago, Leslie Frank said:

They wasted no time to get you to subscribe

 

Just use a fake "throw-away" email (e.g. https://10minutemail.com/).

1 hour ago, thelearninglearner said:

If I don't like the trial, can I request my $1 back? Because if I'm buying, I'd like a refund policy

 

This is actually mandatory by law (14 day refund on all online purchases), if you want to take them to court if they do not comply is another matter....

[Leslie Frank]

10 hours ago, thelearninglearner said:

I don't see a point to "send me a free trial" 

Just give it to me on the site.

I don't know if it's still that way, but many years ago, that's how it worked with Ninchanese. You set up an account and started learning for free on their site (at that time they didn't even have an app; I believe they do now on the android side on Google play). If you wanted higher levels, then you could subscribe and every so often you could get discounts. I stopped subscribing after awhile cuz I wanted to concentrate more on health and medical terminology which they didn't have much of but I still have access to the levels/lessons I had previously accessed.

[Leslie Frank]

8 hours ago, Jan Finster said:

What is wrong with nihao?

An attention getter to maybe make them seem cool? Relevant? There are lots of online articles and videos that try to make it seem like 你好 is somehow not authentic or used in real life by natives, but that's not so. I talk to natives pretty much everyday in the work setting and for both Cantonese and Mandarin speakers, they almost always use 你好, sometimes several times throughout our phone conversation, like when I put them on hold and get them back, then it's another round of 你好's. The only time they might not use 你好 is when the same person is calling me on consecutive days or several times on the same day because they're having issues that they want to update me on, and they may just start the conversation with 係我呀/是我 instead of 你好. But outside of the work environment, the 你好--unless meeting someone for the first time--can be replaced with 點呀/好久不见/去哪儿, or an assortment of other greetings.

[Jillina]

Hi Leslie,

 

First, we'd like to thank you for your feedback. I am sorry that you didn't enjoy the experience. But please allow me to answer some of your doubts.

 

As you can see, this is a new concept and we'd like to know how everyone thinks. That's why we asked people to sign up for a free taster, which doesn't cost anything. So we know how many people are interested in this concept. Without doing so, we will have no idea if this idea is worth developing.

 

The reason you receive an verification email to confirm your email address is to increase the chance that the free taster email will end up in your inbox instead of promotion folder or junk folder. We understand not everyone checks these folders. So we figured this will be the best way for people to get what they sign up for. However, very unfortunately, this doesn't mean the email will end up in your inbox for sure.

 

And also we use email automation to do this. Once you sign up, the system will send out an email to verify your email. Once you verify your email, the system will automatically send out the free taster email immediately. But I guess the technology is not perfect... I've checked the system and all the first email got sent out to everyone who has verified the email. So I will double check what happened. But at the same time, it would be highly appreciated if you could check your other folders. 

 

Regarding the $1 full trial, again, we'd like to test the market. If everything is for free, more people will go for it. But it doesn't mean we can keep going with the project without any fund. So it's just another stage to get an idea how long this project can go for. Maybe half book or one book, or more. It really depends on how much people like it.

 

I hope the above explains your doubts. I will send you a private message. And if you'd like to give us another chance. I will send you the access of the free version by personal email. So you will get it for sure.

 

Regards,

Jillina

 

 

Edited March 11, 2021 at 05:58 AM by Jillina

[Jillina]

I forgot to mention, we are creating a demo, which will be shown on our website soon. This means you don't need to subscribe to anything to try out what the concept is like. We are still in an early stage of developing the whole idea. We understand what we have is not perfect and a lot of things can be improved. So we are extremely grateful that every of you has spent your time to give us feedback. This means really a lot to us. Thank you so much for this!!

 

For people who don't like children's books. That's totally fine as this is probably not for you  We believe everyone has different preference so we are not going to say this will work for you for sure. But if anyone wants to try something new, this is just another thing to try.

 

Regards,

Jillina

[Leslie Frank]

4 hours ago, Jillina said:

The reason you receive an verification email to confirm your email address is to increase the chance that the free taster email will end up in your inbox instead of promotion folder or junk folder. We understand not everyone checks these folders. So we figured this will be the best way for people to get what they sign up for. However, very unfortunately, this doesn't mean the email will end up in your inbox for sure.

Thanks for your response, @Jillina, I got your company's (Rabbitas) verification email in my regular inbox on March 8, the same day I went onto your website and subscribed to get the sampler; however, I received nothing else from Rabbitas in any of my other folders until today, March 10, 9:46pm, that again, landed in my inbox. Your intention of providing the sampler "immediately," is the right thing to do but in practice, that did not happen.

 

Be that as it may, the concept is not bad--it's good to make the lesson interactive, but since this is a sampler that you're hoping to entice the consumer to pay to use, the sampler should be near perfect. The "Practice" option takes the viewer to the image of an announcer/host type of character with a cartoon talking bubble that has an obvious typo in the question: Whcih [sic] one means "inside"?

And while the "Practice" button gets you over to the next segment right quick, the other choices, "Lesson" and "Extension" takes their sweet time to the point you think there was a glitch.

 

After going through the sampler, I have to say I agree with @Jan Finster that an anime/manga, or something more contemporary with photos of China would be a more attractive product, whether you're talking about having kids, or adults as your target audience. The current images used didn't excite me to want to see more. It's ok to use stock illustrations (if these are illustrations you paid someone to create, they don't look that way unfortunately), but if you're going that route, you could probably find ones that fire up the imagination more.

Overall, the live host did a nice job, although there's one part that I couldn't make out. Was she trying to say, "H"? Whatever she said, I tried listening to several times and just couldn't understand her.

 

Of course, this is just my opinion; there may be a market for what you/your team have already created; it's just not my cup of tea. I respect all efforts to help people learn a new language though, so kudos for your endeavors, and all the best.
 

[Jillina]

Thanks for your kind words Leslie. I really appreciated it.

 

Thanks for picking up the typo. We have actually had 4 people reviewing the whole product for at least 50 times but I guess when you see the same thing over and over again, you kinda become blind. So thank you for picking this up. And hopefully this is the only error we didn’t see

Regarding the image style, we will take it into consideration. However, we do not have budget to hire an illustrator. ? So we are just promoting the idea and hopefully people who would like to see the idea developing are willing to support us a bit.

 

We understand our product is not for everyone, same as any product in the world. We do have our reasons to go with children’s books. One of them was from my personal experience. When I was studying English when I was young. I thought reading a book in English would help me a lot. So I bought Harry Potter. ? As you can imagine, I gave up after reading the first two sentences. I had to look up almost every word and it was extremely frustrating. I didn’t read anything in English until I got introduced to children’s books and it helped me so much! I did the same when I was studying Spanish. The fact that I was able to finish the whole book and understand the content was very satisfying and I was motivated to read more and more books. 
 

So I guess I should have mentioned more clearly in my original post that our produce is more suitable for beginners or people in elementary level. If you have a good level of Chinese, then I can see why people will find it boring.

 

In the end, I hope I have expressed my idea clearly. For any feedback or criticism, we would like to return you with gratitude. If no one says anything, we will have no way to improve. So thank you again for spending your precious time on helping us to make things better.

 

PS there is nothing wrong with 你好. We do use it to greet in our video lessons as well. But since hundreds of videos on YouTube are teaching it, I don’t think we need to do the same again. ?

 

Edited March 11, 2021 at 10:33 PM by Jillina

[Leslie Frank]

@Jillina I originally wasn't sure if you/your company was legit. There'll always be a market for children's books. I just thought you could distinguish yours from the others because the graphics used are reminiscent of ones that existed from some years ago. I prefer a more game like environment like Ink Mountain but you can't compare your product with theirs in terms of imagery because they are affiliated with a museum and it's just a game; it's just that if there was a learning app that had that kind of game-like feel, I would get sth like that in a heartbeat and keep playing as many levels as they would develop. There are some apps that claim to be game-like but not anything like this ?

 

Regardless, what's key is content which I couldn't really tell with the sampler, but apart from the the graphics, you seem to be on the right path. Good luck ? 

[Jillina]

@Leslie Frank Thanks! As we do not have much budget, we do use the existing images. So I understand why you feel that way. We will be running a campaign in Kickstater soon and hopefully we will be successfully funded and we can improve the illustration and design. 

 

I totally agree with you regarding game-like learning app and that's my goal for our practice section. I've had a look at Ink Mountain you mentioned. Of course we are not able to compare with their product and that's not what I will be after either. However, I've got some inspirations and can definitely develop our practice section to something more interesting. 

 

Thanks for the advice and encouragement.