Chinese In Flow

Learn Chinese Characters


About

An introduction to this site and the ideas behind it

This is a site for learning and practicing Chinese.

The aim of this site is to provide a way to review and study Chinese in a way that is simulating.

The title "in flow" comes from the idea of learning in a way that holds you attention and stimulates you to the point where you focus all of your attention and feel a sense of flow. In most of the content there some kind of timer or countdown which I hope adds a sense of urgency increasing the level of stimulation. What's more the rate at which words or image appear increases to hopefully give a feeling of rapidness. The aim is for a user to get to the point where they have to concentrate completely and be constantly moving and clicking the mouse rapidly.

As much as possible the content adapts to the users ability so that if a user already knows most of the vocabulary items it goes quicker.

The focus of a lot of the content (especially the HSK stuff) is on recognition rather than production. The key idea is to repeatedly show a set of items in a way that re-enforces the initial point of recognition. For example, concentrating on the same character for 30 seconds would be useful but in doing so you don’t practice the initial recognition of the character as you’re constantly thinking about it. Instead, if you have a few different characters and repeatedly have to recognize them in quick succession then the recognition is strengthened a lot more. I think that by practicing the recognition of characters in this way the associations between words/audio and images /meaning can be strengthened. This association or link is what is most important when learning vocabulary. Of course it's better to have a longer break between exposures - looking at a character once a day for ten days would likely be better than looking at it ten times in ten minutes.

Also, with most of the content here, repetition is important and so I tried to make it so that the same vocabulary items are seen a bunch of times over and over again.

Feel free to send me an email through the contact page if you have any thoughts or ideas about learning Chinese.