Make New HSK Courses?

Wuxian · September 2, 2016, 1:30am

I remember reading on a thread sometime back, I think it was Ben that had said it reflecting back on how he made the courses and said that he took the word lists and put them through some kind of algorithm and they came out ordered by radical/root. Not sure if he could be contacted to comment on that.

Hydroptere · September 2, 2016, 12:33pm

well, Ben cannot be bothered lately (i mean the last two years or so)… Guess the company got too big, or he is working on several projects…

roflcopterlol · September 2, 2016, 12:41pm

I agree with the need to test from English word ==> Chinese word. I find that the blue HSK courses I went through to be incomplete. Because I find the testing from Character==> Pinyin to have no real translation to a language skill. I even tested this, I would grab a dialogue/podcast, learn the pinyin of all of the words I didn’t know, and I still could not understand what was being said… so clearly, there needs to be a more active retrieval of that information in your brain. The “clue” being given is just too great when you are provided the characters. For example, it is very easy in these types of courses to know the individual pinyin of both characters, but not know the English meaning. So, you never are forced to associate the pronunciation with the definition.

I find that this testing direction is really useful for helping me to memorize the pronunciation, and sometimes, it even helps me with listening. There already are courses that do this though. The one I am working through right now (HSK Complete With Examples by Niallo) does this. I find to be successful in these courses you have to already know the English meaning of the characters before you can approach it this way. It is so helpful in fact that I find myself translating my thoughts into Chinese in my head because of how easy it is to pick up the pronunciations after learning the English meanings of the 2-character words.

Wuxian · September 19, 2016, 11:24am

Hey Drew, I saw in another forum you mentioning the creation of the new HSK 6 course, which is awesome. I mentioned below but i’m curious if you have any feedback on how to create a HSK 5 course that is basically the same as this one but teaches component characters before teaching a multi-character word, ie. teaching 蔬 before teaching 蔬菜.
Also, in instances where there are characters that are not taught in the course but are_emphasized text_ included in a multi-character word that is taught(whether before or after a compound word they are in), could they be included as well?

Just curious of the manpower or simplicity of doing something like this. I know for the word order, I read somewhere that Ben originally ran the vocab lists through some script.

Wuxian · September 19, 2016, 11:27am

Hey I just wanted to shoot you a sort of primitive method I’ve been doing to sort of solve this issue we were discussing and I think it’s working a bit. Basically when I learn new words, I write them down ONLY in English in a little notebook. I carry this book around with me and read the english and say a sentence with the Chinese in my head. I also try to use those English lists to write sentences in Chinese once in a while on my computer. I find that using the words this way forces you to “produce” the word yourself and has been aiding me a bit in conversation with even relatively new words vs. podcasts and flashcard systems that are more focused on the passive elements of learning.

DrewSSP · September 19, 2016, 2:55pm

@Wuxian Hi Wuxian. If you are thinking about making an HSK 5 course, I should warn you that it’s a lot more effort than you are expecting. I am always an advocate of the logic where you should triple the amount of effort you think something will take the first time you attempt it. Making Memrise courses is no exception. I ended up building that course almost completely with scripts because I was just fed up with a lot of the repetitive work.

As for the character script that Ben used, that was simple Regular Expressions. It’s pretty simple if you have any experience with that. I did it for you. PM me your email address and I can forward it to you. I can’t upload it to this forum.

j4sm197 · September 23, 2016, 4:29am

@Spurdosparde

Regarding Auto-ignore scripts made for HSK Courses:

I used your scripts you posted back in April on the old forum to auto-ignore HSK 2 to 4; I’m now up to HSK 5 but I can’t manage to modify the script for it to work, despite following the instructions you wrote. If you (or anyone else good with this) can modify the HSK 4 script for HSK 5 I would be really really happy

Links: Script for HSK 4: http://pastebin.com/uJLgNKXK

Original Forum Thread (which contains more links): http://web.archive.org/web/20160528193148/http://www.memrise.com/course/984/hsk-level-4/thread/1779663/

Thanks for reading this far, you are awesome I’m sure I’m not the only person with this problem

Arete_Hime · September 24, 2016, 1:40pm

The below looks at the first column (prompt I think), to have it look at the second column, change all 3 instances of col_a to col_b:

// ==UserScript==
// @name memrise auto-ignore
// @namespace http://localhost
// @description auto-ignores Elements from a Memrise Level if they appear in a given list
// @include http://www.memrise.com/course/*
// @version 1
// @grant none
// ==/UserScript==
var HSK3vocab = [

‘plz ignore me!’,
‘and me!’,
‘and me too!’

];
var HSKvocab = HSK3vocab; //this specifices which characters are looked for. If you want to do HSK4, you want to auto-ignore all characters from HSK3 and hence choose the HSK3vocab variable here. If you want to do HSK5, take the HSK4vocab variable.
//Button to call ignore-function
var input = document.createElement(‘input’);
input.type = ‘button’;
input.value = ‘GreaseMonkey: ignore words’;
input.onclick = pageHandling; //calls main function
input.setAttribute(‘style’, ‘font-size:18px;position:absolute;top:120px;right:40px;’);
document.body.appendChild(input);
//presses the ignore button, ticks off words that coincide with the list, saves changes.
function pageHandling() {
var ignoreButton = document.getElementsByClassName(‘ignore-show button mini’);
ignoreButton[0].click(); //clicks the ignore-Button of the memrise webpage, opening the menu that allows to select characters to ignore.
ignoreWords(); //ignores the respective words, see function below
saveChanges();
}
//looks through the words and ticks off those that already exist in the HSKvocab variable
function ignoreWords()
{
var characters = document.getElementsByClassName(‘thing text-text’);
for (var i = 0; i < characters.length; i++)
{
var col_a = characters[i].getElementsByClassName(‘col_a col text’);
for (var j = 0; j < HSKvocab.length; j++)
{
if (col_a[0].textContent == HSKvocab[j])
{
var checkBox = characters[i].getElementsByTagName(‘input’); //the checkbox of this character
checkBox[0].checked = true; //checks the checkbox
}
}
}
}
//saves changes after the boxes have been ticked
function saveChanges()
{
var saveButton = document.getElementsByClassName(‘ignore-save ignore-ui btn pull-right btn-primary btn-large btn-block hide’);
saveButton[0].click();
}

j4sm197 · September 25, 2016, 2:58am

Omg it worked!! Why didn’t I think of writing that? Thanks so much!!

…

(It doesn’t work )

Arete_Hime · September 25, 2016, 3:09am

If you’re going to be sarcastic I will stop replying.

Edit: oh, surprise, it does work.

neoncube · October 3, 2016, 4:10am

@matteogiuseppe has created a parallel course for DrewSSP’s HSK 6 course that shows English and has you write Chinese. Thanks to him! The course can be found at http://www.memrise.com/course/1231273/hsk-level-6-native-audio-coming-soon/

matteogiuseppe · October 3, 2016, 8:52pm

Thanks @neoncube! I’ll be breaking the course up into levels soon and am exploring options on getting audio added!

I’d prefer native audio so I’m looking for any memrise users that have a script to run on the DB.
Otherwise, I’m considering working with my teacher to record OR sigh using Forvo by hand…

If anyone has any ideas, I’d appreciate it!

neoncube · October 21, 2016, 11:05am

@matteogiuseppe, would you mind making a course forum for that course and maybe editing the course’s description with a link to the course forum?

By the way, if you’re planning on breaking the course up into levels, it might be good to do that sooner rather than later, because if you break the course into levels, I believe it will delete the progress of anyone who has already been using the course.

matteogiuseppe · October 21, 2016, 3:11pm

Thanks for the heads up @neoncube! The course is broken up into levels now.

Edited comment:

New course URL here: http://www.memrise.com/course/1231273/hsk-level-6-with-native-audio/

Course forum here: [Course Forum] HSK 6 with native audio!

neoncube · October 22, 2016, 3:03am

Great! Thank you

DrewSSP · January 4, 2017, 10:02am

I’m not really sure where you guys stand with the creation of new HSK courses but I just thought that I’d let you know of a new tool I created.

You may be aware that, when creating a course, you can type a part of a word into a database and it Memrise will try to autocomplete it with things that are already in the Memrise database. If you choose one of its seggustions, Memrise will nicely include the mems and audio for that word if they exist. The problem is that this tends to be a very slow and tedious process because you can’t easily achieve this with Bulk Add. You need to type each word manually.

I created a Python script that does this for me. It takes any Chinese words that I give it, “pretends” to type the word to find Memrise’s suggestons, and adds the suggestion that matches exactly what it “typed”. I’m doing this to make a no-typing HSK 5 course for myself and it’s half done. Only 10 words so far are not in the database so I’ll have to type out those missing ones myself. The rest have pulled in the mems and the audio from the original HSK courses.

The bad news… it’s not a perfect script because it’s pretty hard to deploy it. In other words, I can’t just pass it off to you guys and expect it to work. Each use of it requires me to go in and customize the script for each course.

If you guys can agree and decide how testing should be done, I can populate new databases for new HSK courses and then you guys can go ahead and make the individual levels after that.

Hydroptere · January 5, 2017, 11:59pm

this is a humble request for both @matteogiuseppe and @DrewSSP: please mention/give as alternative along the erhua variant also the standard ones (for ex 心眼儿 could/should have as alternative 心眼, etc)

also @DrewSSP, entry 灵魂 there is a typo (i think you wanted to write conscience and some “c” got missing)

many thanks

matteogiuseppe · January 6, 2017, 3:42am

Ok, I made the update for 心眼儿。Unfortunately, if I search the database for 儿 nothing comes up so I’ll have to do them one by one. (Not sure why that is)

So, I’ll do my best to make the updates when I see them but please send along a list when you see them and I’ll fix. Thanks!

Edited: Okay, I did a search on the spreadsheet I have and there’s actually only a few so I made the changes listed below. Let me know if anything else pops up!

心眼儿
玩意儿
纳闷儿
大伙儿
墨水儿
纽扣儿
馅儿

Hydroptere · January 6, 2017, 9:52am

Mille grazie, Matteo!

— [email protected] wrote:

DrewSSP · January 11, 2017, 2:28am

Using my new tool, I decided that I would like to dedicate some of my time to creating a no-typing series of the HSK courses. I’m before I do so, I was hoping for a little bit of feedback.

I obviously intend to test on the English translations of words. I’m wondering if people think it would also be beneficial to have no-typing levels that test on the pinyin as well.