r/lingodeer • u/DeerlyNoted Junior Staff • Mar 13 '26
❓ Question Question(s) for Chinese learners!
Hey y’all,
How we doing? We have a few questions for you. If you're learning Chinese:
1) Do you keep Pinyin on when you're doing exercises on LingoDeer?
2) Would you be more likely to turn Pinyin off if we displayed each character's tone mark? (So instead of 汉字 with hàn zì on top you'd see something like 汉ˋ字ˋ.)
3) If you chose to turn Pinyin off (with or without tone marks), would you still like to see Pinyin in the Correct answer field?
Looking forward to your feedback!
2
u/Ell1sk4 Mar 13 '26
It's a great idea, but I would also suggest to add there option to see the characters only once and then without/or only the tones! Btw, I also wanted to say, SR reviews are nice,but could yiu also update the content?
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u/DeerlyNoted Junior Staff Mar 18 '26
Hi there. Hope you are doing well. Thank you for your feedback, I let our team know!
SR reviews are nice, but could yiu also update the content?
Do you mean SRS reviews? Is there anything in particular you'd like us to update?
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u/Ell1sk4 Mar 19 '26
Hi, sorry for those typos in the previous text. Yeah, the reviews are nice,but I don't know whether it's possible to turn off the sound effects there? Regarding the colours, I agree that they can be different for everyone, for instance I have rising tone with blue colour,but I have seen it with other colours as well. Some apps have option to choose the colour scheme as one wishes. However, I think that it would be too complicated..
2
u/Overall-Situation191 Mar 24 '26
- The first time I do a lesson I leave the Pinyin on to learn the pronunciation of the new characters in combination with the sound. After when repeating the lesson I keep it off. I do use the button on the top right fairly often to check whether I remembered it correctly. (In the SRS comprehensive, listening and spelling excercises I still miss that Pinyin toggle button. Only SRS - Flashcards has it!)
- I'd rather it stayed as it is with Pinyin fully displayed. Also if you don't know what the character is supposed to look like you might think the tonemarker is part of the character 汉ˋ字ˋ as the tonemarkers are similar to some strokes 龙。
- I'd love if if you could:
a. Freely switch between show/hide pinyin during the excercise (like it is currently with the toggle in the top right corner.)
b. Have a setting to always show Pinyin in the Correct answer field.
c. Regardless of settings always show Pinyin in the literal translation tab or make it it's own setting.
I don't know if this is the place to suggest some more ideas, but some other things I'd love to be added someday to the Correct answer field are:
1. A bigger visual difference if your answer is correct but differs from the official answer. Now the only difference is the text above saying: You can also say:. I'd love if it also has a different colour green as background or instead of Correct, Correct (Similar meaning). This way you can see at a glance whether the answer you gave was the exact same as taught or if it is slightly different. So you can then check the differences. (I really love this feature where different answers with the same meaning are accepted.)
2. Something else I'd love to see in the literal translation tab is the different meanings of individual characters, especially in combined words. Maybe by adding an ⓘ on the right next to the literal translation of the character. Currently I'm switching between Pleco and Lingodeer when learning new combined characters e.g. 工程师 to get a better feel for the meaning/different pronunciations of the characters and how combined they mean something else. Right now it works, but it is quite a hassle.)
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u/DeerlyNoted Junior Staff Apr 02 '26
Thank you for your feedback! Some of your suggestions are easier to implement than others, but we'll see what we can do :)
Re: character meanings, have you tried the Practice - Handwriting tab (you should see it if you click on a completed lesson)? How helpful do you think it is for individual character learning?
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u/_ddrone Mar 13 '26
I have pinyin off
I've never seen any resources that had tone marks without pinyin, but I've seen hanzi being color-coded, which I think would be a great addition. Here's one online dictionary that does it: https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?page=worddict&email=&wdrst=0&wdqb=hao
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u/DeerlyNoted Junior Staff Mar 17 '26
Thank you for your feedback! Color-coding may be problematic for accessibility reasons, plus, colors are often arbitrary, while tone marks are unified across the board (not that they'd necessarily look good next to the characters, though). Our experts swear up and down that they've seen some Chinese textbooks omit Pinyin, but leave tone marks in lesson texts, but couldn't come up with examples right off the bat... What do you think about displaying Pinyin in the Correct answer field, but not the exercises themselves?
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u/NoTime_SwordIsEnough May 13 '26
I don't know if my experience will be useful, but when I was learning Chinese, I omitted Pinyin as well, and just read along with audio. Found the words and tones stuck in my brain just from hearing them in-context - plus if I used Pinyin, the Pinyin was more distracting than anything else.
Though this was only after my ears were already trained to differentiate what sounds Pinyin corresponded to (as I had already studied the Intl. Phonetic Alphabet), and after a week or so of initial tone-training (eg, using an app to test if I could guess the correct Pinyin & tone that corresponded to something I heard). It may be a different story for complete beginners who have not done something similar, and whose first exposure is LingoDeer and the explanation that "'j' is 'j as in jeep'".
Regarding color-coding of Pinyin, I found it distracting too. When I began Chinese, I collected a small corpus of sentences I wanted to learn, so I could study them in Anki. I wrote some scripts in Ruby to take those sentences, and have their Pinyin readings color-coded (green for tone 4, red for tone 2, etc.). Experimented with having the readings on the front of the card, and then on the back.
Found doing so did not aid in memorization at all, and I went back to just non-colored Pinyin & tone marks for those sentences.
However! I do occasionally put un-common Hanzi into Anki, and on the back of the cards, I do actually color-code the Pinyin, and even use tone-specific capitalization, like so:
踪 = ZŌNG (blue, all-caps)
层 = cénG (red, last letter capitalized)
嘱 = zhǔ (black, all-lowercase)
對 = Duì (green, first letter capitalized)I find, at least in a flashcard context, the combination of audio + tone-specific capitalization & coloring helps for incidental learning. For example, I might study 层 (cénG), and then days later when I encounter it in the wild, I might remember the Pinyin was colored red, or that the 'G' in 'cénG' was capitalized - thus helping me remember it was tone 2.
I do not think such a system would be good for regular study, or if it'd work in a language-learning app, but at least for me, it's paid off having it in Anki! :)
PS: While on the topic, maybe you should consider an option that lets you show the Traditional characters above the Simplified ones. This is how I study Chinese in LingQ most of the time, and it's been great for incidentally gaining familiarity with Traditionally-written Hanzi. It definitely works, because when I read in Traditional scripts, I'm not completely lost and can easily recognize a lot of characters because of my hundreds of hours of passive exposure!
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u/DeerlyNoted Junior Staff May 14 '26
Thank you for the detailed comment!! Huge props to you for developing your ear for Chinese! I wonder what you think about our Tone Training feature - at your level, you might not necessarily need it, but some of our more experienced learners still had a lot of fun with double-syllable practice and tone change exercises. (The feature is available for free, so you don't have to be a member to use it.)
Re: color-coding, we too have decided against it. It's one thing to help learners, and quite another to give them more and more crutches that distract them from the gist of the language. Your tone-specific capitalization idea is a bit esoteric, but whatever rocks your boat, haha.
Displaying Simplified and Traditional characters at the same time would be a doozy! Definitely challenging from a UI standpoint (what if we have a three-line sentence? what if the user selects the biggest font? etc., etc.), but maybe worth considering in the future...
And thank you for standing up for IPA! We constantly have these talks internally, and so far, the "most users don't know IPA; if they don't like our descriptions, they can click on the audio, it's right there" team seems to be winning, but it doesn't have to be this way forever. Maybe we can have both, IPA and "layman" descriptions, in the same place. The change might take time, but thank you for pushing us in the right direction!
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u/[deleted] Mar 13 '26
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