Welcome to the Redwork Apps Blog, a journal about the apps I've made, why I made them, and how to get the most out of them. I’ll start this off with my newest app, “River of Chinese”. River of Chinese is a vocabulary reviewer/trainer for learning words in Mandarin Chinese.
One of the biggest challenges English-speaking learners of Chinese face is mastering the vocabulary. Since the two languages are so dissimilar, almost every single word is completely different from it's English counterpart (possibly with only two exceptions: “Mama” and “Baba”). Ultimately the only way to learn such an unfamiliar vocabulary well is to have lots and lots of exposure to the words and practice. A lot.
Of course, flashcards are the traditional solution: carry a bunch of cards in your pocket and review them whenever you get the chance. They’ve been around forever, and everybody’s used them. With the invention of smart phones now you don’t have to carry all the cards around, and the translation of flashcards to apps on smart phones actually works pretty well. But I didn’t really like the mechanics of how flashcard apps work. They seemed slow and awkward to use. Most apps have a combination of movements and gestures you have to perform as you work your way through the cards. Tap on a button to flip the card over, then tap on another button to see the next card. Or swipe the card to the left, or maybe to the right. Some systems ask you to decide if you got it 'right' or not, kind of a distraction from just trying to focus on the actual words.
Chinese also poses a special problem for flashcards since they’re essentially two-sided but with Chinese you’re really dealing with 3 distinct pieces of information: the hanzi character, the pinyin pronunciation, and the English translation. When you look at a hanzi character you’re trying to recall both how it’s pronounced and what it means. The standard flashcard model doesn’t handle that very well, since it has only two sides it has to reveal both answers at the same time.
So I set out to develop somthing that addresses these issues, something I would want to use myself: an interface that strips away all the awkwardness and just lets you concentrate on learning and reviewing the words. The mechanism is very simple, most of the apps people use all the time work the same way, like the "endless scrolling feed" that's typical of the all social media apps.
The hanzi flows up from the bottom, first it's just the character, then just before it reaches the middle of the screen, it's spoken (if the 'auto-speak' is on). Just after the audio, the pinyin appears, and then as the hanzi scrolls up a little more finally the translation appears. Everything is revealed gradually, and the user can easily control when the various elements appear.
The app is designed to be used anywhere you've got a moment to spare to review some words. It works best if you have headphones/earbuds and listen to it with auto-speak enabled so you can hear the words being spoken by the iPhone's build-in Chinese voice. Some of the words are spoken pretty softly (like "wu") so it helps to wear headphones in noisy places.
Strategies for Using River of Chinese
First Time
At first, when you’re brand new to a set of words, you can use the app to just skim the words quickly and hear them spoken while seeing the pronunciation (the pinyin), and then reading the translation. Just let them scroll by in your endless ‘feed’, until you start to recognize them. You can view them in the standard order, or shuffle them.
Recognition
After a while you’ll start to anticipate the pronunciation of words as you see them, so then you can briefly pause each one as it appears and look at the hanzi characters before you hear it spoken (stop it just below the vertical midpoint of the screen). Then slowly scroll up to hear it spoken and then see the pinyin appear. You don’t need to try to remember and speak every word at this point, just let your mind naturally recall what it can as you slowly reveal the answers.
Testing Recall
Eventually you’ll want to test yourself, trying to say the word aloud before the app says the word, and then also try to recall the English translation out loud before it appears. As each character scrolls upward 'catch' it near the bottom of the screen and try to speak the word before you hear it, and of course pay attention to the tones, and then just after you've scrolled up to verify your recall of the pronunciation, stop again before the translation appears and try to recall that. If you realize you're having a hard time with this you can go back to the review phase where you just let the words scroll up naturally without stopping them to test yourself.
Start Small
The sets generally have between 20-25 words in them, so you can learn a small chunk of words at a time. After you’ve reviewed each set in a topic you can review the whole set of 100+ words, on shuffle, to really test yourself on recall of the topic.
That's really all there is to it, I intentionally made it very simple so it's easy to jump in and out of, it's great for casual review when you have short moments of time throughout the day, but you can also just sit and 'doomscroll' for as long as you want to and never run out of characters to study.
On the App Store:
Click here: River of Chinese, to see it on Apple’s app store.
If you're seriously studying Chinese I'd also recommend my other app: Chinese Numbers, for learing numbers and counting.