Great, sounds good. By the way, where are you getting the entries for the HSK missing course? Are you just taking note of missing bases/characters as you come across them in HSK 5? Do you search at all through HSK 6 to see if random root characters ended up being part of its vocabulary somehow?
When I manage to finally get through 5 and 6, I’ve been thinking it would be really cool to make a reordered course/set of courses that disregards HSK order but uses all its vocab and missing root characters to teach from start to finish in a logical progression. No idea how that would be ordered though. In the old website-included course forums Ben Whately had mentioned that when creating the course order he ran the characters through some dictionary’s algorithm someone had created.
I am adding them in order of occurrence in the blue HSK 5 course. I break them down to their basic radicals and build them up to components then characters and if necessary bigrams. I use ArchChinese for this as it is very intuitive. This order is vitally important as when finished this course could be taken alongside the blue HSK course for maximum efficiency.
While doing the HSK 4 missing words I came across certain components which are not HSK 4 and are quite possibly HSK 5 and 6. I am careful therefore to not make any duplicates across the courses.
I do not search through HSK 6 because that list has no bearing on learning HSK 5. Of course, when I make the HSK 6 missing words course I will be sure not to add duplicates. All this just means that missing words 4, 5 and 6 should be taken in order as they all contain vital information for learning Chinese.
I intend to make my own HSK 6 course before the end of the year.
Things are slow at the moment but within a month or so I will kick into gear and you will see a lot of progress. In the meantime just hang in there. Things will happen.
Yeah I had the same issue with learning Spanish - it took a while to figure out if a course was the right one. There were also lots of good beginner courses, but few that had sufficient content beyond that. I’m hoping that one big advantage of the HSK lists is consistency between learning platforms. If they all use the same lists it’ll be easier to move between platforms or use different methods concurrently because they’re all drawing from the same source.
I think I’ll go through them one by one, ignoring as I go, and once I get to perhaps HSK5 I’ll learn all the words on that course (main advantage being that I then get tested on inputting the character for the earlier characters) and do as you suggest with the missing words courses and so on. I’ve been spending a lot of time learning to recognise the tones and I’m not doing too badly there; still a bit of work to go on actually pronouncing them.
Thanks for all the effort in maintaining these courses for those who do it - we all appreciate it!
Sounds good, no rush and definitely looking forward to checking out the HSK 6 course. Is there something you’re focusing on in wanting to make a new HSK 6 course? I was just looking at them today and the one by Malstronikus caught my eye.
Also, before I start making any changes to your missing words courses, I’d like to confirm two points:
Do I need to be doing any changes to the course database, or will simply adding alts or changing definitions within the actual levels suffice?
Do you have any qualms with me changing the main visible entry of a word if it is not consistent with sources? (If I do this i’ll add the old definition as an alt or hidden alt depending on its accuracy to not mess with your learning or with someone who has learned the incorrect definition databased on memrise and comes to the course). I don’t think I’ll be erasing and changing the main def. often though from what I see. For instance in “雄”, I plan to leave “mighty” as the best representative of that meaning as visible, and place the second visible as “male” since that’s also a dominant association. Any other definitions seem to be closely related to those so I would either not add them or just add alts.
Do I need to be doing any changes to the course database, or will simply adding alts or changing definitions within the actual levels suffice?
*If you are learning a word and discover an error the best way to edit is to click the “edit” button at the top left of the screen. Alternatively, if you have collected a list of words to edit then the best way is to open the database and search for each word individually. All changes you make will reflect in the levels and vice vera.
Do you have any qualms with me changing the main visible entry of a word if it is not consistent with sources? (If I do this i’ll add the old definition as an alt or hidden alt depending on its accuracy to not mess with your learning or with someone who has learned the incorrect definition databased on memrise and comes to the course). I don’t think I’ll be erasing and changing the main def. often though from what I see. For instance in “雄”, I plan to leave “mighty” as the best representative of that meaning as visible, and place the second visible as “male” since that’s also a dominant association. Any other definitions seem to be closely related to those so I would either not add them or just add alts.
*The thing here is that most of the definitions don’t belong to me. The process is as follows:
Input word into memrise search.
If the word exists click add (this is where the dodgy definitions come from.)
If the word doesn’t exist then create a word with the definition from ArchChinese.
Anyway, it seems that it is just you and I doing the course at the moment so you won’t hurt anyone when making changes. Feel free to change the main definition and if the old one has no basis then feel free to delete it. I trust your good judgement.
For 漂, which is learned as “piao1”, what is happening is that this character actually has 3 pronunciations and three core meanings.
“piao1” has the floating meaning,
“piao3” has a bleaching meaning, and
"piao4" has a meaning tied to elegance.
With this, you can see that, more likely, the 3rd category, or “piao4”, is the meaning category that lends itself to “漂亮” with elegance tied to it’s meaning of beauty.
In HSK1, the course creator decided to teach the “piao1” meaning in the sole character, so it gets confusing with the changed pronunciation that comes in the 2 character word.
Sometimes tone changes are clear like this, sometimes, in my experience, the tone just randomly changes in a word. Sometimes a character will randomly have a unique actual pronunciation (different actual word sound) in a particular word.
What could help here is if the mods allowed the “piao4” pronunciation for the single character as a alt/hidden alt answer. This actually might already be available. But the tones of 漂亮 are correct as piao4 liang5.
Actually, even when a speaker is using a sarcastic usage of the word, for instance if someone makes a clear mistake and someone says “beautiful” with the intended meaning of “nice one, moron”, one could say that this is spoken as “pi1…ao4 liang5”, but that first tone is not a first tone, it’s very much extending the first part of a 4th. And usually in this situation you’ll just hear a very slow “piao4…liang5” to highlight your blunder. Point being, it’s a 4th.
I’m back after a short break moving house. By the end of the month HSK level 5 missing words both blue and red will be finished and up and running. The blue course will be strictly moderated for desktop users and the red course will be strictly moderated with App users in mind.
Hey i’m not sure if you’re a mod in HSK 5 blue, but if so could you give me contributor privilege? My only drive is to add hidden alts that exist in the Red HSK as primaries. For example 对比 is “a contrast; to contrast” in red, but in blue “to contrast” is marked as yellow (partially incorrect). I won’t be touching the primary answers considering how many users have a history with this course.
Hey, this might seem like a selfish request, but if you still have everything you used to make the HSK courses 1-5, could you make another one with all the different words in them (unlisted or public) where the the testing for every new 25 words (such as level 2, 4, 6, etc in HSK 1) is reversed, so it shows you the english meaning of the word and you have to write the hanzi?
If you mean the larger HSK courses, these actually exist for levels 4 and up. Blue HSK courses are typically the dual level type where you enter the English definition or the pinyin. The Red HSK courses are what you’re after.
I don’t think they exist for HSK 1-3 though. The Red courses help me out big time since they help the part of recall that directly translates when you know the English word, so in turn help with conversation.
You mean ones like HSK level 1 - Introductory Mandarin (with audio)? Cause that’s the exact one I tried, but got put off by the fact that you have to write the english translation after seeing the hanzi instead of selecting the right hanzi after seeing the the english translation, I’ve just gotten too used to that sort of testing from all my Japanese courses
The chinese words by frequency from BenWhately are actually closest to what I want, except that they only dedicate one level for every 25 words and don’t test on the pronunciation. If they had that they would be perfect for what I want.
EDIT: Also, I could sort of copy the entire course with the memrise utilities script and swap the columns on which it tests you, but then I’d lose the alternative answers, attributes and audio columns of the course, and you know how important audio is for beginner chinese courses.
EDIT 2: Also forgot to mention before that even if I copied it like that with memrise utilities, the hanzi with english would count as a different item in the database that the same hanzi with pinyin, meaning it would create situations where, for example, you’re asked to select the hanzi for the word “child”, but you have 2 buttons with 子, one that’s connected to the english meaning and one that’s connected with the pronunciation. In this case due to both of them counting as different items in the database only one of them would be counted as correct, meaning that you’d have a 50% chance of making a mistake when in reality you’ve got nothing wrong.
So in short, I can’t even copy it with memrise utilities without having to manually move each column of cells containing the pronunciation next to the one with the meanings for the same hanzi. All in all, it is definitely possible, but would require quite a bit of work (unless I figure out some way to sort the cells with items from uneven level numbers or something like that) and would be much easier if I got some help from the creator of the course or a contributor.
You mean ones like HSK level 1 - Introductory Mandarin (with audio)? Cause that’s the exact one I tried, but got put off by the fact that you have to write the english translation after seeing the hanzi instead of selecting the right hanzi after seeing the the english translation, I’ve just gotten too used to that sort of testing from all my Japanese courses
Yeah that’s what I was referring to. Keep in mind that the RED HSK 1-3 are the testing direction you dislike and after that the RED courses are in the style you’re asking for. I began with Ben’s words by frequency and then switched over to the HSK courses early on because to me it seems like a more complete system for Chinese on memrise. I am not familiar with how to just download a course and switch the testing direction in entirety, that may have been a feature removed years ago? I know that if you’re a mod of a course, you can duplicate a single level in the same course and switch the testing direction. I do that for my own courses. But even if you were given mod access, I don’t think you would be able to copy and paste to a new course.
If the earlier courses don’t exist in the testing direction you want, I would do what you are doing, creating a new course with the definitions you want. This would actually be really helpful to be able to add your own allowed definitions. A lot of these earlier words are roots and unless your goal is to take the HSK, being confined to one or two word definitions when you know what the meaning is sometimes is aggravating.
I would suggest doing the style of testing you don’t like in addition to the one you do. In my experience: Prompting with English and typing Chinese will help with speech through active translation. Prompting with Chinese and typing the English helps with reading. Prompting with Chinese and typing the pinyin helps (especially in the first 4 HSK courses) for learning the tones of single characters. After a while, all these styles of learning can reinforce each other in different ways.
Also, if you’re not committed to memrise yet and you plan to stick with Chinese for a while, you might want to check out Anki. You can download memrise courses into Anki through a addon and then customize cards, testing directions and also make input to be typing like memrise. That’s just a thought though, something i’m currently looking into as the site currently seems to be going through some changes that gamifies it a bit too much for me.
TDLR: Not sure for missing words courses. You may need to make your own course for HSK 1-3 courses in the opposite testing direction. Doing all three testing directions helps.
Don’t worry about me quitting, I’m almost like a memrise veteran, 3 years of experience with over 15k items learned and over 29 mil points, you can check out my profile. And for downloading the items you can see in the levels when you’re not editing it can be done with memrise utilities. And yeah I’ll have to stick with my own version of the course until I’ve made some progress.
@student-of-life hey do you mind putting me as a contributor for HSK 5 (blue). I’d like to add some hidden alts that should be there, primarily main entries for HSK 5 (red) that aren’t accepted in blue.