Hit back-button twice to exit.
All other controls are on the screen.

Scholar Chinese

This is a 自己学习 course, a self-study course. You must study each part of each lesson until you truly understand it. It's you or nobody here. And there is a lot of work in this study of Chinese. So you will need a long-distance mind for it, which is a good thing to have for everything else.

Flashcards

The dialogs assume you know the vocabulary. The vocabulary comes from the flashcards. But Scholar Chinese does not hold your hand. It gives you one corner and you have to go get the other three. Or what would 孔子 think of you? Study the vocabulary until you know it, until you can read and write it. In traditional and simplified, if you're serious.

The flashcards have the vocabulary for each exercise in English, pinyin, fan3ti3zi4 (traditional), and jian2ti3zi4 (simplified). You select a lesson of flashcards to study or to test yourself on. Records of your activity are in the memo. The study mode links simplified characters out to the www.xiaoma.info dictionary.

Vocabulary includes ONLY the basic defiition for the given lesson. Characters do have multiple meanings. But we will overload them gently, rather than all at once.

You should use the flashcards to learn to write Chinese as well. I recommend learning both 简体字 and 繁体字. I know there are political overtones to each and each has its good and bad elements and consequences. But, hey, I'm just a 德州人, a Texan. My choice is to love all Chinese and learn both. There is no guidance for stroke-order. Good ones are available on-line.

Dialogs

Dialogs are preceded by notes which explain things not obvious from the text and audio. Hit the "Begin Dialog" button to load the dialog on screen and prep the audio. Dialog screen can be rotated to landscape.

Audio controls include:

Be aware that too many restarts will overload Android's tiny mind and cause audio-confusion. The audio will pause on incoming phone calls and such. It will let you start where you left off when you come back. Be aware that if left idle too long, Android will reset part or all of what the app was doing when you left. Or kill it all together so you have to restart the app. It's an Android thing.

The dialogs come from the public domain DLI and FSI courses. These were originally on reel-to-reel. (They are big WAV files here because of Android requirements for controlling playback speed.) There is better audio out there for Mandarin if you wish to pay for it. But these dialogs are well-done. And MOST of your problem will not be audio quality. Even with the crisp audio of other courses, you will struggle not only with tones, but with the different ways people speak and with the way Chinese treats tongue position and aspiration. Mostly you will struggle with the feeling that you have been dropped down a black hole for the first three months of everyday study.

These dialogs are well-conceived and you will find them sufficient for learning Mandarin if you stick with them. I did. I used them for my own self-study. And because of them, I speak, read and write Chinese. Truly, you will miss some of these speakers when you finally finish the course and say goodbye to them. I particularly miss Female Voice Three in the FSI audio who sounds just like Yufang in Tsui Hark's film 七剑下天山 (English title: Seven Swords).

Glossary

The glossary is NOT a dictionary. It is a learning tool. It searches on pinyin, NO SPACES, NO TONES. You can find 想 (xiang3) with x, xi, xia, xian, or xiang. Mandarin is overloaded by syllable and even syllable with tone. The glossary is designed to help you sort out this confusion. Note that u-umlaut is v in pinyin.

The glossary has its own icon on your device. If you start it WITH THE ICON, you can switch back and forth between it and the lessons even in early versions of Android. You will want to hide each unit's Glossary icon as you acquire the next unit.

Because of my handling of definitions, characters which have more than one definition will appear multiple times in the glossary. As I said, this is NOT a dictionary.

But you will want a dictionary. I recommend the free Pleco. It is better than any Chinese dictionary you can buy. If it seems too complicated (and it is a bit complicated), try Hanping. I use Hanping Pro as well. But Pleco is a big part of how successful and how fast my Chinese language study has been. If you are serious, you will end up with Pleco and will certainly buy some of its add-on dictionaries and features. When you need a better English-Chinese dictionary inside Pleco, I recommend the deFrancis, which costs only about ten dollars US.

You can also use the on-line "chinesedictionary.mobi" and "www.xiaoma.info" dictionaries, if you wish. They are both very good and somewhat different. I use both as I work with this course.