决 is missing "definitely, certainly, to burst, to execute (a person)
many thanks
(@Bobstein, i don’t quite get your question, if you refer to the numbers instead of accents, this is just one way of giving the pinyin - a very spead one btw)
* Thank you for the detailed feedback ~bug/report. I’m still trying to work through your remainder characters, but it’s probably going to be a little slower going forward as I have my plate full and am behind in my own character review. 0=}
决 Primary changed to ‘certainly(definitely, under any circumstances)’;
Alts changed to ‘(bound forms)to decide(execute sb, bid farewell, sever relations, be breached, dredge)’ (inc. all to & non-to forms + hidden ‘to burst(a dike|dam)’; naturally, each set members above are also split into hidden individually valid answers. ‘sb’ and ‘somebody’ are hidden valid expansions as well.)
Can someone explain how this Course is related to the HSK 1-6 courses by BenWhately? Do the “Most Common” courses replace the HSK courses? Supplement them?
I’m currently doing the Mandarin Chinese 1-3 courses by Memrise, but they don’t seem to take you all the way to proficiency, so I’m trying to understand where to go next. Thank you.
I haven’t personally used the “most common” courses (the 1-500, 501-1000, etc.), but after taking a glance, they seem to teach the individual characters, which would make these courses definitely a supplement. From the “official” courses you’ve taken, you know that Chinese words are often made up of multiple characters. Theoretically if you just learned the individual characters, you could get through all 2,000 and not know how to say 你好.
Different people people take different approaches. Most people in one way or another establish a sort of Mandarin “beginner base.” The official courses are relatively new but it seems to me that this is what they provide. I established my “beginner base” through classes, completing the “Michel Thomas Mandarin” audio tapes, and then walking around China listening to Chinese podcasts and trying to talk for my first year, so my experience was very skewed towards talking and listening. I decided that only learning this way had limitations for me, because even if one could get very proficient in speaking, there are always less colloquial words brought up that could throw someone off. Hopefully, in a “base” you’ll learn a degree of survival Chinese and an understanding in how the language works, how the tones work, and a pretty good grasp of beginner to intermediate grammar since those are all things you can just practice off the bat.
After this, or during this depending on your curriculum, you need to climb the mountain that is Chinese vocabulary. If you don’t climb the vocabulary mountain, you could be having an academic conversation and suddenly a waiter could ask you a question using words that may as well be Korean. And this WILL happen. You WILL somehow go through 5 years and someone will floor you with a new way of saying “i’ll handle it” or “i’ll grab the check” or “how’d it go?”.
So then comes this mountain. The HSK format is so that, you will learn a very large amount of useful words along with ancient words that will help you remember the useful words. I am of the opinion, that if you get through HSK 5~6, you will be in a position to then being able to practice much more efficiently and able to reinforce the language much more without being overwhelmed.
To get through HSK 4, I don’t think someone needs to learn a large amount of single characters outside the HSK 4 vocabulary list. Most of what you need is taught, ie. you will learn the single characters in the set HSK 4 list of vocab, as well as multi-character words. Once you get to HSK 5 though, you will start to see a large amount of characters you have never seen before, yet you are now introduced to them as multi-character words, effectively making you learn multiple words at once. Additionally, since your memory likely will depend on these words being together, seeing either of these words alone or with another character won’t bring automatic recognition in a lot of cases. This is the point where I see the “most common character” courses becoming relevant, since they fill in the blanks.
I personally used another user’s courses (studentoflife) and then went on to make my own private courses for learning single character vocabulary to solve this. Others can probably give you more feedback on how they use these “most common” courses, but to me it seems they basically go through them together or separate, but to complement the HSK courses, because like I mentioned, learning all the characters won’t allow you to necessarily say anything, and many of the single character definitions are archaic, or tied to only one use of the character.
Treat the official courses as an upside down pyramid. In the beginning, the amount of vocab and grammar and application is narrow enough that they can cover it in sentence form and making everything comprehensive with voice and room for error, etc. But once it gets to a certain level, there would need to be a site with makers dedicated to each language to actually bring “fluency”. The HSK lists are flawed, but are mostly pretty useful. So set your sites on getting through the HSK vocabulary after you finish the official courses. While doing this check out the Chinese grammar wiki website and learn it alone or as a course on memrise. Then supplement your learning with an interesting podcast for listening and read beginner books or find a website for reading. Always be chipping away at the vocabulary mountain if you don’t know what to study at the moment and pace yourself realistically so you don’t burn out.
TLDR: Finish the official courses. Do HSK 1-4. Use Chinese grammar wiki. Use the “most common” courses as a supplement or make custom courses for single words while doing HSK 5-6. Profit?
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Hello. Thank you for this course.
When this sort of screen shows, I do not see how to add a space as the answer (in this example) requires. (Answer: to go out) Am I missing something or is there not a way to add a space in between the English words? Thanks for your help and your course.
@pfs32 This is a problem with the memrise keyboard. I’d advise you to use your computer’s keyboard to type. I’d also advise to ignore the memrise keyboard as much as possible since it’s assisting your memory. I feel that it’s better to be wrong and have that word’s algorithm adjusted accordingly rather than realize later on that there’s a mountain of words that you can only pull from when given a hint.
If you want the memrise keyboard fixed, maybe you could make a post in the web bugs section and include a mod’s screen name in your post.
Hey there!
Quick question. I can read Chinese pretty well, but my writing is pretty abysmal. I though a memrise course, simple characters, lots of typing tests plus handwriting input keyboard on my phone should do the trick, that’s why this course looked pretty good. But this one, and all other I can find, are still mostly audio/multiple choice based… is there any way I can change the test type to typing only? Or is there a course someone can recommend? I thought about restarting the HSK ones but can’t be bothered to mill through all these characters I know really well, just can’t write them by hand.
If anyone has ideas or recommendations, thanks in advance!
Ronja
Definition
army
Word
军
Pinyin
jun1
has no audio 
In level 41, the pinyin for the word 没 can be “mei2” OR “mo4” but it will only count as correct if you write both of them. However, I’ve seen that with all the other words that have multiple pinyins, you will be correct as long as you write one of them. Every time I review this word, I write “mei2” as my answer but it says it is incorrect. To answer correctly, I must write “mei2, mo4.” Not that this is a big deal, but can it be changed, please? Thanks!
Hi, is there a way to prevent characters with the same sound from appearing together? E.g. “fei1” can mean 飞 and 非. Otherwise, allow both to be correct answers?
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@Temshop, I think it may have been that the mei2 and mo4 were separated by a ‘,’ perhaps? I changed it to a semicolon. (many of the other characters with multiple pinyin answers are separated with semicolon with no alts listed.) If that doesn’t work, then the only workaround I can think of is to change the primary def to “mei2(also: mo4)” and add “mei2” and “mo4” to alt def. list individually. But then people that want to intentionally answer “mei2; mo4” or “mei2, mo4” or “mo4, mei2” or “mo4; mei2” won’t be able to type the double answer unless I also add all 4 combinations to the alt list. I wouldn’t be able to do that with all the various multi-word answers.
TL;DR: I think I just changed “mei2, mo4” to “mei2; mo4”. I’m hoping that fixed it. If not, I can add all the pinyin to alts and consolidate the primary to one major pinyin (with alt(s) in parenthetical)
@hanchin Hi! I’ve been out of the loop, but I’m not aware of a method. If the “part of speech” is shown, that can be a hint to know which character is being requested is the best I can think of at the moment.
@omnivore Thank you, that worked! I just have one more request. In level 41, could the pinyin for “发” be changed to “fa1; fa4?” Currently, the pinyin for “发” is just “fa1.” However, it is also pronounced “fa4” in some cases (ex. the word for “hair” is “tou2 fa4”). Thanks!!
why all the characters became so unreadable all of a sudden? anyone else experiencing this issue? 
In lessons 1 and 3 (words 1 to 25), the male’s audio for “wei4” (为) sounds like “bei4”.
Really liking this course. It has tipped me off that some particular words with a broad range of meanings need some further study just on their own. (I’ll check other resources for some example sentences for those words.)
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