Mnemosyne Flashcard Learning Program
We encourage our students to use the Mnemosyne flashcard learning software to study Mandarin Chinese. The Mnemosyne is a sophisticated free flash-card tool for efficient learning, which optimises your learning process and resembles a traditional flash-card program to help you memorise question/answer pairs, but with an important twist: it uses a sophisticated algorithm to schedule the best time for a card to come up for review. Difficult cards that you tend to forget quickly will be scheduled more often, while Mnemosyne won’t waste your time on things you remember well. There are a number of Chinese language free flashcards developed by various authors which can be imported to Mnemosyne. We recommend the following two sets of cards for basic and advanced Chinese language studies.
Hanzi (School Years 1-6: People’s Republic of China)
The Hanzi, contributed by Michael Engel, contains the Hanzi Chinese characters learned by Chinese pupils in China; divided according to school years 1-6.Example categories：SY1aH: school year 1 part 1 Hanzi (for learning to read)；SY1bPY: school year 1 part 2 PinYin (for learning to write).
20,000+ Chinese sentences with translations and pinyin
These flashcards, contributed by Brian Vaughan, contain Chinese/English sentence and pinyin. These sample sentences are broken up into two files: 1) zh-en_sentences.xml: The questions in this file are Chinese sentences. The answers are pinyin pronunciations and English translations. 2) en-zh_sentences.xml: This is more for practicing writing. The questions contain English and pinyin, and the answer is the Chinese expression. Each file is broken up into a number of categories labeled according to HSK level (Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi 汉语水平考试), the Chinese Proficiency Test. To download its zip file click HERE.
To download Mnemosyne 1.2.2 for Windows click HERE. You can find the detailed explanation and getting started tutorial at Mnemosyne Project website HERE.
Alternatively, CLICK HERE to watch the step by step video tutorials created by withinjapandotcom explaining how to download, install and use Mnemosyne flashcard program.
Please note that depending on the amount of infomration uploading when importing learning materials to Mnemosyne, it may take quite a while to import all data to the Mnemosyne program. It may show ‘not responding’ when importing, but please wait as it is operating at the background, and when all required data are uploaded, the sign for ‘not responding’ will be gone.
For other self-directed learning, you can learn Chinese Pinyin, 100 most common Chinese characters with 40 common phrases in flash. Or, you can download 2500 Chinese characters flash, and learn at ease through 10 interactive Chinese movies, with active participation in watching, listening, speaking, reading, and even writing simultaneously.