<story><title>Learn to read a sentence of Chinese in 3 minutes</title><url>http://blog.memrise.com/2011/11/learn-to-read-a-sentence-of-chinese-in-3-minutes.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>westiseast</author><text>it&apos;s good - Chinese has an extremely steep initial learning curve, and this would be a good start. I also think the methods are sound (ie. mixing the word in, substitution, the way the actual tool tests you).&lt;p&gt;&amp;#60;pedantry&amp;#62;
It does feel very limited. I think you&apos;d outgrow this in a couple of weeks TBH.&lt;p&gt;For example, this article gives 子 as one of the first characters, and says it means &quot;child&quot;. It does, but it also doesn&apos;t. On its own it is purely conceptual, and only has meaning combined with other characters. If you said &quot;my 子 is 4&quot; then that makes no sense. It can mean bullet (子弹), atom (原子), son (儿子), or a generic &quot;thing&quot; measure word (eg. 骗子, conman).&lt;p&gt;An early learner doesn&apos;t need to know the word for &apos;bullet&apos; or &apos;atom&apos;, but it&apos;s not good either to tell them that &quot;子&quot; means child and then they think they can say &quot;child&quot; in Chinese. What&apos;s the parallel in English? It&apos;s like teaching you &quot;pre-&quot; and saying that means &quot;early&quot;, and then you run around saying &quot;He arrived pre-&quot;. Why not just teach the word for child (孩子) and then substitute that? Then you learn to recognise &lt;i&gt;meaningful words&lt;/i&gt; and not &lt;i&gt;conceptual characters&lt;/i&gt;, which is actually the key skill in reading Chinese.&lt;p&gt;You have to start somewhere, but I wish that more Chinese learning tools/books used modern learning methods like these, but with better linguistic accuracy. 
&amp;#60;/pedantry&amp;#62;</text></comment>
<story><title>Learn to read a sentence of Chinese in 3 minutes</title><url>http://blog.memrise.com/2011/11/learn-to-read-a-sentence-of-chinese-in-3-minutes.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>aidos</author><text>I&apos;ve always wondered what would happen if you read a big book (like Lord of the Rings) that was translated progressively into another language. So it starts in, say, English and finishes in Spanish. At the start the sentence structure could even be in Spanish form (word ordering-wise) and words are progressively switched to Spanish as the book goes on.&lt;p&gt;Probably wouldn&apos;t work at all but it&apos;d be an interesting experiment.</text></comment>