Chinese Language Beginners

If you are starting your study of Chinese from the beginning, or you feel you have forgotten most of what you have learned earlier, it’s quite simple: You make sure the level and lesson on the main page of the app are set to to “1”, press on “Lesson” and answer the questions. You can take a lesson as often as you like.

You should do at least one revision session, and preferably more, between different lessons. This is not mandatory, but you will find that it keeps your revision sessions to a manageable size. The spaced repetition principle used in the app means that the more revision sessions you do, and the more frequently you do them, the smaller they will become, since you forget less between sessions.

Intermediate Learners

Basically, you have two further options. If you are at a particular level, say the beginning of Level 4, and you feel totally confident that you remember all words and character from previous lessons, you can just dive in by setting the level and lesson to your current one and taking the lesson. Chinese Drill will then not bother you by testing knowledge of earlier material during the following revision sessions. Still, you should do at least one revision session between different lessons, as mentioned above.

If you don’t feel quite so confident, you can make use of the “Schedule Previous for Revision” button in the Settings. Before pressing this, you should make sure that the level and lesson on the app main page are set to whichever you want to start lessons from. Afterwards, in your next revision session, you will be asked all words and characters from Level 1 / Lesson 1, in the following revision session all new words and characters from Lesson 2, and so on, until you reach the last lesson before the one you started from.

Furthermore…

Everything on the pages which is dark orange is clickable (unless the text is greyed out), so feel free to press on these areas during a session to see how cross-referencing works. Note that if you press on a character in a multi-character word, you will be taken to a descriptive page for that character, whereas if you press on the “Ref” button to the right of the word, you will be taken to a page for the word as a whole.