Essential Chinese is an app for the introduction to vocabulary, phrases, and grammar of the Chinese language. It covers most basic conversational topics in daily life. Each lesson focuses on one topic. However, free lessons are limited, the user needs to pay for more lessons. It has 3 sections in each lesson: vocabulary, grammar and conversation, which allow the user to practice listening, speaking and recognizing Chinese words and phrases. Games are designed at the end of each section. This app is good for beginners to start learning Chinese from the beginning.
Chinese Pad provides interactive Chinese books and articles on the app. It includes a built-in Chinese-English dictionary, an open content platform and a set of tools to drill users in the basic language skills. With this app, the users can practice their handwriting; record their voices and test their knowledge on a certain topic. This app is good for learners of intermediate level or above. Because the content is more focus on Chinese culture, custom, folk stories and idioms.
Learn Chinese provides a couple of free lessons with various topics. In each lesson, selected vocabularies on a particular topic are displayed with pinyin, characters, sound and pictures. The user can listen to the sound of the word repeatedly. After each vocabulary is introduced, a test follows up asking the user to match the sound of a word with its picture. On this app, the user can create a profile and keep their learning history and results recorded. It is an app designed for a more audio-visual style learner. It meets the needs for those who just simply wants to name things in Chinese since it doesn’t cover phrases, sentences on a conversational level.
Chinese Skill is an app designed for testing. When the user starts a lesson, he enters in a quiz window right away. However, the quiz seems to breeze past many aspects of language without any specific focus on any of them. For example, in a quiz, the user will be asked to match a sound with a Chinese character; trace writing a character; fill in blanks for a missing word in a sentence; then translate a sentence into English. The user can review all the contents by taking formal tests that come with four categories: flash card, character, word and sentence. This app is a tool for testing learners’ knowledge so the user is supposed to have some background knowledge.
iLearn Chinese focuses on teaching learners Chinese characters. It believes that a large number of characters are required for effective communication. It emphasizes the historical information of each character and demonstrates the writing of characters stroke by stroke. The users are able to practice the writing on the touch screen as many times as they like to “feel” and “program” the stroke orders into their memory. The app has image icons for characters of both concrete and abstract meanings. That means it provides pictures for not only real objects like “desk”, “cup”, but also abstract concepts such as “love” and “year”. This app is good for those who love to research about the history of Chinese words and learn Chinese from writing and accumulating words.
Very well done!
ReplyDelete