Chinese@OU app for iPhone and iPad

This free, interactive and fun Chinese character learning app is developed by experienced Chinese language teaching academics at The Open University (UK).

Learning to read and write Chinese characters presents three major challenges to both non-native learners as well as Chinese children who first start learning characters:

- the complexity of characters as an average character consists of about 12 strokes;


- matching character form with pronunciation, Pinyin form and the English meaning;

- using characters to form sentences

This app attempts to tackle these three challenges on one screen with interactive activities to help you write, recognise visually and aurally, and memorise some of the most frequently used characters in a systematic, friendly and fun way. Most importantly it helps you to form phrases and sentences with the limited characters learnt.

The app contains 200 plus most frequently used characters taught at beginners’ level. By combining them, you will learn a further 200+ useful and essential words and phrases. For example, by combining 电 (electric; electricity) and 视 (viewing; sight)), you learn the word 电视 (television). You will have the opportunity to search for some common words in the Word Search Activities.

There are 16 lessons which chronologically build upon each other. Each of the 16 lessons has five interactive activities with audio embedded: Writing, Reading, Listening, Rearranging, and Identifying or Word Search.

Writing: In this activity you can watch the animation of stroke-by-stroke drawing of each character, hear the pronunciation, learn Pinyin and its English meaning, and most importantly draw the character with or without the model with your finger.

Reading: Here you can test yourself on recognising the characters you have learnt in the Writing Activity. Match the character with Pinyin or English, and you will get instant feedback.

Listening: Here you can test your understanding of i) some characters you have learnt in the current lesson which are single character word (e.g. 早: early); and ii) words consisting of two or more characters, which are made up of characters you have learnt in the current and previous lessons (e.g. 早上: morning). Instant feedback is provided.

Rearranging: Here you get the opportunity to practise forming a sentence based on the audio you hear, using the characters provided, which you have already learnt. Instant feedback is provided.

Identifying: Here you are presented with five groups of characters. Each group consists of four similar looking characters. You will need to choose the character that matches the English. The feedback provides a word/phrase that contains this character.

Word Search: Here you have the opportunity to search for words/phrases that consist of the characters you have learnt up till that point. This activity not only helps to develop your character recognition skills but also to remember characters in context, and it is fun to play!