iLearn Chinese Characters Lite Hack 3.2 + Redeem Codes

The organization is excellent. In 'progressive study' mode, you learn characters based on their frequency of use, and have to pass a quiz to move on to the next few (6-12) characters. Or you can look up characters based on category without taking quizzes. In either mode, you get both basic and advanced examples of how the character is used in a phrase. There's also an index organized 'alphabetically' by pronunciation. The app would be improved by placing the traditional character (and the ancient pictogram, when available) in an obvious and consistent spot on every page. It would also be cool if the quizzes gave you a definition/pronunciation and asked you to draw the character.

As a historian of ideas, I've had to learn to make my way through a number of languages, to date, I can read without over-dependence on a dictionary etc. around twelve. Like most Westerners, I was at first intimidated by Chinese because of the characters. However, I found that learning characters is no more difficult than learning any set of vocabulary and the manner this program teaches characters makes even that fairly straightforward, and it's etymological approach to explaining characters appeals to persons who see history as a wonderful type of storytelling. The fact that compared to Sanskrit and Classical Greek, Chinese grammar, such as it is could be described as either non-existent or a "cake walk" only serves to make things more easy and more enjoyable, is just an added benefit to the program's manner of treating the primary difficulty Chinese does present.

The best information and detail I've seen so far to break down Chinese characters with their original meanings, and then contrasting simplified vs traditional. Understanding the history and reason for the pictograms makes everything much easier to remember.

The downside is the app is very ugly and a face lift would really do this app justice! This should be one of the top Chinese apps.

I really love the way this app explains Chinese, and it's a really good app for learning the language. However, i do agree that the app is a little ugly and I do want there to be more advanced lessons and tests, and also tests that quiz your ability to write the characters as well as read and comprehend. Overall great app!

The pros of this app is as follows: This app is very helpful for beginners & foreigners. It gives you the pronunciation of the word with a native voice. It does a demo on stroke order on how a character should be written. It gives a little history / background on how the word was evolved. The only things that I would say that are the cons would be that where there is a box for you to practice your stroke order, it still allows you to continue the character in spite of whether your stroke order is WRONG. The app should recognize when you are NOT writing the correct stroke & should not allow you to continue.

I've been meaning to learn Chinese for a while. Being the basics or more interestingly the characters.

After trying multiple apps, I found this to be a great resource for beginners who are passionate about learning Chinese.

It breaks the writing, history and how-to to help you start Chinese very quickly. If you have an iPhone or iPad, you can immediately enable he Chinese writing and practice some of these characters that you learn.

Great work..

My husband is very visual and prefers understanding the visual breakdowns of the characters. He is absorbing so much better. Thanks!!

Great if all you're looking for is simplified. Don't download otherwise.

I have many Chinese apps. This one has some very good points, but others not so good. First, the animated writing is so slow it wastes an incredible amount of time. An option should be added for the user to choose the speed of writing. In fact, I have a much better suggestion: get rid of the writing part of the app altogether. There are other apps that are so fantastic for writing practice, that I don't know why anyone would get any other. See my reviews of the Panda Words writing. But this app has something unique and wonderful and should be improved upon. It shows a bit of history of many characters, including ancient oracle bone depictions. I'd like to see the meanings expanded. The sound is excellent, but I don't think any compounds are offered. That would be another big improvement: let the user scroll through compounds, idioms, and sentences that use a character, all with sound, but do NOT STITCH the sound together from the sounds of individual characters. And how about adding some discussion of grammar considerations for many of the words? All of this would make a much better app. Get rid of the writing.

No systematic approach to learning Chinese was working for me. Too many characters. Too many radicals. Too many new sounds. Too many new words. Too many new idioms.

The brilliance of this app is that it works "inside out" one word at a time. For a given word, you learn its particular strokes, radicals, sounds, history, and related words and idioms all on one screen. That's not too scary. Then you move on to another screen, and learn about another word. And, maybe another day, another word.

Eventually, I revisited some other Chinese learning resources, and they aren't so intimidating any more because, in their large arrays of knowledge, I now recognize a few "friends" that I met in "I Learn Chinese Characters Lite".

There is a lot of material in the lite version. I still haven't finished it, but I bought the full version already, because I wanted to reward the developer for giving away such a useful lite version.