{"id":8963,"date":"2017-02-14T21:44:53","date_gmt":"2017-02-14T21:44:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/?p=8963"},"modified":"2017-02-14T21:58:42","modified_gmt":"2017-02-14T21:58:42","slug":"introducing-chinese-quiz-tournaments-wordswing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/introducing-chinese-quiz-tournaments-wordswing\/","title":{"rendered":"Introducing Chinese quiz tournaments on WordSwing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Playing games, especially with other people in a situation of friendly competition, is a great way of boosting motivation.<\/p>\n

I’ve wanted to find a way to provide this for Chinese learners for a while and now Kevin and I have created a first version of a Chinese quiz tournament over at WordSwing.<\/p>\n

It’s free, but you need an account to participate. If you want to try it directly, click here<\/a>. If you want to know more about the quiz tournaments, then the rest of this post will introduce them in more detail!<\/p>\n

Chinese quiz tournaments on WordSwing<\/h3>\n

A quiz tournament is a few rounds of short, multiple-choice reading comprehension questions. We might expand this to other areas, such as listening, culture and Chinese language trivia, but at the moment, we’re trying it out with simple reading comprehension.<\/p>\n

Each question is a race against the clock. You and your opponent will each be asked the same set of questions and you are tasked with trying to answer each question before the clock runs out. After you respond to each question you can study the content at your leisure before moving on to the next question.<\/p>\n

A typical question looks like this:<\/p>\n

For each question, your task is to read the Chinese sentence and select the best answer among the four or five choices given. Only one answer is correct. The timer at the right shows how much time you have left to answer.<\/div>\n

Who is this for?<\/h3>\n

There’s currently only one level of difficulty, so if you’re a complete beginner, this will be too hard, and if you’re an advanced learner, it will be too easy. It should be good for intermediate learners, though! Here are a few more sample questions to help you gauge the difficulty:<\/p>\n

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At present, there are only a couple hundred questions, and so as you play, you’ll start to see some questions a second or third time. So even if these questions are quite challenging given your current Chinese level, with some playing, you’ll soon be able to get many answers correct.<\/p>\n

Why is it a good idea?<\/h3>\n

There are several reason this is a good idea for learning, some of which have been mentioned briefly above. Here’s an overview of the reasons why we wanted to created this activity:<\/p>\n