

Students who are taking the HSK test or other standardized tests for Mandarin Chinese language ability stand to gain from using the app. WCC Bigrams is a good app for students who are at the advanced level and are focused on improving their reading skills. But most people will get too frustrated with this approach and, at the very least, it’s a huge time investment and it isn’t the best way to gain traction in your studies at the beginner and intermediate levels. Could you read through newspaper articles about politics and business and learn Chinese? Absolutely. It doesn’t take too much imagination to figure out what kind of text these words would appear in. For example, here are some words in the top 50 WCC Bigrams list: 24 government 政府 zhèng fǔ,27 the people 人民 rén mín, to conduct 进行 jìn xíng,48 representative 代表 dài biǎo.

The reason for this is because the most common words that show up in Chinese text are not very accessible to beginner or even intermediate students. That’s a wonderful goal but it’s only reasonable for advanced students. But perhaps you are ready to do this and take on the task of reading and making the necessary connections own your own. It’s tough to make a word stick just on its own merits and this is essentially what WCC Bigrams does: it shows you the word and leaves it up to you to make the important connections so that it stays with you. You want to memorize it in a set of words that are similar or, even better, learn it in context.

When studying vocabulary the most important thing to do is to make connections with it to other words. Why? Well, first, even though the words come at you in order of frequency, they might as well be random. But all by itself, the app isn’t very helpful. There are plenty of benefits to learning the individual characters.) Certainly, if you are at a level where you are doing a lot of reading, this app can help reinforce what you are most likely seeing. (Note: this is just a hypothetical opinion. Why learn the most common individual characters when it isn’t likely you will need to know them in isolation? Better to learn the most common words. So in this way WCC Bigrams is on the right track. It frequently combines with other characters to form a noun, like 盒子 hé zi which means “box”, in which case 子 zi doesn’t carry any real meaning at all. For example, you might know that 子 zǐ means “child.” That’s definitely helpful information but 子 zǐ usually doesn’t mean “child” in context. It is kind of similar to studying latin or greek roots in order to better understand English: it’s helpful, but probably not the first thing you want to dig into when jumping into studying Mandarin. But if you’ve studied Chinese at all, you know that knowing characters is different from knowing words. Most others go for the most common characters. This app is enticing because it focusses on something unique: words. flashcards read like dictionary entries Review.audio is clear but very unnatural and irritating to listen to.options to customize studying Thumbs down.

It gives you the statistical frequency of each bigram, the definition of the bigram as well as the meaning of each character, pinyin pronunciation, simplified and traditional characters and audio pronunciation of the words. The WCC Bigrams App is a flashcard app that drills the learner on the most common two-character Chinese words (bigrams) that show up in written text.
