Archive

Girl Saves Universe, a text adventure game

In our seventh interactive text adventure game for learning Chinese, your fate becomes linked to your mysterious uncle's cat, enabling you travel to a distant place in the universe, where you must attempt to restore the connections that bind the universe together.

The pedagogical value of mapping your adventure

Our text adventure games often involve exploring a world described in Chinese. Remembering where you've been and how to get around can get tricky, particularly given we (intentionally) don't provide a map. But there's nothing to stop you from drawing your own. And indeed we highly recommend this!

Adding visual context to an adventure game

Our fifth text adventure game, The Magistrate's Gallery, has illustrations throughout the game that add visual context to aid your Chinese learning.

The Magistrate's Gallery

The Magistrate's Gallery is our fifth text adventure game for learning Chinese. In this game you are an artist who must help a professor find his daughter. It seems she has been trapped inside a painting. But which one? And how can you get her out?

Tracking your progress in the WordSwing iOS app

Track your learning progress in WordSwing's iOS app while you practice Chinese.

Getting up to speed with Chinese reading

Some advice on getting up to speed reading Chinese from near-scratch.

Incremental character learning through games

Strategically learning characters in preparation for a text game can ensure you recognize a very high percent of the text.

Turn an adventure game into speaking fluency practice

A strategy for using WordSwing's text adventure games for Chinese speaking fluency practice.

Text Adventure Game: Wandering Cat

Practice Chinese reading and listening on a strange adventure to find your cat.

Pepper & Carrot: Episode 1

Practice your Chinese reading and listening through the fun, magical world of Pepper & Carrot: Episode 1

Pepper & Carrot: Visual Context for Chinese Practice

Practice your Chinese reading and listening through the fun, magical world of Pepper & Carrot.

You smell a strange smell...

Burning Building is our fourth text adventure game for learning Chinese. In this game you begin the game at home in your apartment when you notice a strange smell. A fire! Can you get out safely and alert the fire department in time?

Your new job at the zoo

In this game, it's your first day on the job as an assistant zookeeper. Can you manage to follow the instructions of your boss on how to feed the animals and carry out other tasks around the zoo? Beware though, this is not an ordinary zoo!

Word lists for Children's stories

We created a few WordSwing word lists to accompany children's books that are available on YouTube.

Level up your language learning habits

Whether you are successful in your language-learning pursuits is heavily influenced by whether you're able to stick with it or not. So we've built some (slightly) gamified tools for helping you build your Chinese learning habits.

The magic of learning Chinese through games

There is something magical about learning through games. Why is it so effective?

Into the Haze is not as hard as you think

Our text adventure games work like a interactive, graded readers But when you first dive into a game, you may find it looks like wall of Chinese, and perhaps a bit overwhelming. But all is not lost! The games reuse so many characters that after a bit of play and some effort you will start to feel much more comfortable and capable.

Into the Haze

Into the Haze is our second, and most sprawling text adventure for learning Chinese. It takes place in some post-apocalyptic Chinese city. Your brother has gone missing, and you need to make your way into the city, survive the poisonous haze, and rescue your brother.

And now for a little friendly competition

What better way to motivate yourself than stoking a bit of your competitive instinct? Our Quiz Tournament activity offers a few rounds of short, multiple-choice reading comprehension questions.

Chinese listening through adventure games

Listening comprehension is one of the most important skills when learning a language. With the audio available for our text adventure games, you not only get excellent listening practice, but you'll know how well you're understanding things based on whether you can make progress in the game and avoid mishaps.

Pronunciation Recall

The Pronunciation Recall activity is one of the best ways on WordSwing to review words you have been learning. It pulls words from any combination of your word lists, and drills you using a spaced-repetition algorithm.

Our text adventure game, Escape.

Escape is an interactive graded reader that begins with the main character (you) trapped in a room for unclear reasons, and you must find a way to escape and avoid getting caught, all the while exploring the world of the game in Chinese.

How does the Written Word SRS character-learning gadget work?

Our Written Word spaced-repetition character learning gadget is designed to leverage the combinatorial structure of Chinese as well as the distribution of word frequencies to optimize your learning and save you a boat load time and effort.

Following language through the stages of learning

Learning a new word generally seems to follow a typical progression. First you notice a new word, then after you've encountered it a few times, it starts to feel familiar. And after actively trying to use it in the wild a few times, it joins the other words you feel you've mastered. At WordSwing, we make this process explicit with learn stage levels.

Learning Chinese characters, the most common first

With thousands of Chinese characters to master, it can be daunting to get going and plough through them. But an efficient strategy can make a big difference. In our Written Word SRS activity, you can learn characters in frequency order while practicing them using words composed by these characters.

Help direct our development

One of the fun challenges at WordSwing is that we have a mile-long development to-do list. But rather than let our (perhaps misguided whim) dictate what gets done when, we want to involve our students in the process.

What does knowing 575 characters mean?

There are thousands of Chinese characters. Suppose you know 575 characters, how should you think about this?

Why is WordSwing named WordSwing?

The name WordSwing is part of a metaphor for language learning. The words you learn are vines hanging in the jungle that you can use to swing to new vines (words), and thereby traverse the landscape (language-scape), in a fun, exhilarating, and effective way.

Ever wonder how many characters you know?

Using a little gadget over at WordSwing we can help you estimate how many characters you know by asking you about a small sample.

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