Chinese5k Project Vision

Project vision: Chinese5k

#Background & Problem Description

Mandarin Chinese is described as the most challenging foreign language one can attempt learning. In reality, 1.5 billion people speak Chinese, it’s the worlds most spoken language, which does suggest it may actually be the easiest to learn. The cause of this confusion is simple: It’s not about difficulty, it’s about distance from the learners native language. Chinese people learn it easily because if you are immersed in the environment, its as easy to learn as any language. Nobody struggles to learn their mother tongue due to immersion.

If your native language is English or Swedish, learning Chinese requires an entire “reconfiguration” of your way of communicating. Sentence structure & grammar patterns share no similarity. Chinese is a tonal language, meaning that the way you pronounce a word can entirely change its meaning. Instead of ABC, the writing system consists of approximately 60,000 unique Characters.

Most ways of learning Chinese as provided by online platforms, universities and training centers attack Chinese on “all fronts”, practicing speaking, grammar as well as reading & writing, by hand ^ by computer, all at the same time. This quickly leads to overload and give-up for the students, whom faced with slow progress and the enormity of the learning challenge surrender.

Further, learning Chinese without being in China is challenging as without daily immersion into the language you will never practice your skills enough. A full-time university program in Chinese will at best offer a few hours a week of one to one practice with the teacher, and the value gained from practicing with other students is questionable.

When learning English you gain a lot from watching movies & tv with subtitles in your native language. This gives you the benefit of immersion and repeated exposure. This is very difficult to achieve with Chinese; Native Chinese content is seldom to never subtitled and too challenging except for learners at very advanced levels.

All courses come with a recommended textbook and whilst there are many of excellent quality, great examples and well thought out content, it’s difficult to “immerse” yourself in a textbook. Once you’ve read a chapter, how do you now “study” it? Do you go practice with a friend? Yourself? Do you read the same static chapter over and over? Textbooks and their associated workbooks serve as a great guide and each chapter a sensible introduction to a compartment of the language, but provides no real solution for the student to gradually practice, expand and immerse themselves in the language. These last critical parts are left entirely to the student who often fails to find a suitable method for using the language.

##Users & Target Groups

###students enrolled in courses Students currently enrolled in Chinese courses and learning programs at global universities and high-schools.

###independent learners in china People currently living in China and studying independently, via company provided courses, or independent tutors.

###chinese language teachers, professors & tutors Educators in Chinese language globally.

##Market

-Foreign business in China -Educational institutions -Independent students

###Competing and Similar Systems

Many technological tools for learning languages today are very generic. “Learn 24 different languages at languagesite.com for free!” - great advertising. However, how can any one method and any one site be perfectly suited for all these languages? The desire to market to all language learners gets in the way of teaching one language really well.

Websites such as ChinesePod.com & ChineseLearnOnline.net offer their own courses and are difficult to adapt into an existing course you are studying. Its not going to help you practice the content relevant for your next assignment or chapter you are working on. These also focus on all areas of Chinese all at once, lacking focus.

Specific sites such as MandaRead.com and TheCharimansBao.com are excellent for reading practice and enables the student to easily sort by level. It offers focus on immersion reading which is great for increasing fluency and learning grammar patterns. However these fail to progress students or naturally elevate the content. Apart from HSK levels there is no way to match.

Software such as Pleco offers excellent dictionary functionality and is a strong learning support tool, however the review system simply based on flashcards is too limited. It doesn't help combining characters to word level or practice sentences, leaving the learner stuck at learning word-by-word on root memorization.

##Base Features

###level select The most straight-forward and easiest way to instantly let the system know your current Chinese level when you sign up as a new user. For advanced users, don’t worry you won’t need to go over what you know again.

###learning module Interactive module that will let you “work” with Chinese and do something to practice your content. Control with just keyboard and log in and do a session and you’ll automatically be fed a mix for content for you to renew and new content to learn. You will receive a mixture of individual characters, word-level, sentences and even whole texts when you’ve progressed enough to unlock a new text.

Say goodbye to just boring flashcards showing a word of a definition. Constantly run into a variety of content.

###progress When you know 2000 characters you have enough Chinese under your belt to be at 80% spoken fluency and you are now set to start learning from native videos - your Chinese skills would be enough for you to easily travel indeedndently in China. At 5000 characters you are at a true native level. But how long will it take you? We will constantly give you updated timelines based on your learning rate and activity. Get motivated by seeing your progress each week and set a goal to learn more faster!

###learn & review We track how many times you do an exercise correctly and know how long it’ll take before you’ve permanently learned it. We’ll automatically help you review words to ensure you learn permanently - not just for the next test.

###dictionary Our Chinese learners dictionary covers the 5000 most frequently used characters and in addition to definition contains example use and sentences submitted by our user base of teachers and students! Each suggestion is reviewed and approved by a qualified Chinese teacher.

###native inputs We won’t teach you how to use a “dumbed down” for foreigners version of Chinese input. We’ll teach you to use native inputs from the beginning - which is actually easier than the clunky made up methods! Type Chinese like a native from day one.

###adapt Tell us which textbook you are currently working on and which chapter. We’ll automatically create exercises based on the words & grammar from that chapter you’ve yet to learn. Reviewing and making sure you’re 100% covered for the exam has never been easier!

#Technology

##web first To ensure we can reach people across education institution, countries and systems we’ll build a platform designed to run in the latest browsers. To ensure that we deliver a technically pleasing and interactive application we will build for modern browsers.

Dictionary Database will use MongoDb Doc Database.

The front end will rely on twitter bootstrap, jquery and javascript.

Nginx server with Node & Express.

Lars Wöldern - WP15