Xiao Hu on April 22, 2012
I too would very much like to see a fully integrated practice and testing system.
EXAMPLE EXERCISES (IN A PERFECT WORLD):
- Verb to Object matching
- Select or Fill in Collocations
- Skim and Scan (with time limit)
- Pick the Chinese character
- Pick the radical
- Write a character/Fading character
- Fill in the blank, translatiion (both L1 to L2 and L2 to L-1)
- Speaking exercises (utilizing currect voice recognition software)
- Fill in Pinyin/ Fill in Chinese Characters
- Identify and Select Grammatical Patterns from a Piece of Text
- Identify Register (IE: read a piece of text or utterance and decide if it's formal, informal, neutral, direct, indirect, personal, impersonal etc.)
- Select a Summary (IE: what answer best summarizes the passage)
- Write a Summary
- Synonym/Antonym exercises
- Register Conversion exercises (converting a piece of text or a word between registers, in other words, convert Formal to informal, colloquial, idiom, Idiomatic, etc.)
- Picture-Adjective exercises (a picture comes up on screen and we have to pick what best describes it, or type in a description)
- Video-Adjective exercies (just like pictures except with video)
- Identify the mistake
- Correct the mistake
- Teacher for a day, students explain a concept (using Chinese) like they were the teacher
- Identify Parts of Speech exercises (label a piece of text with the part of speect, EG: noun, verb, subject, object, verb, subject, predicate, co-verb, etc.)
- Reorder the sentence
- MATCH YOUR VOICE TO NATIVE SPEAKER (speak and pass only with a 90% or above phonic match)
- True/False exercies
- Consolidation exercies (consolidate a long, run-on piece of text into a shorter more concise version while keeping the meaning intact)
- Convert to Chengyu exercies (pick and/or key in a Chengyu that best matches a given phrase)
- Convert to slang/Colloquial language exercies
- Colloquial to Business conversion
- Explain or Define a Chart or Graph exercies
- Listen and Summarize
- Categorization exercies (IE: categorize the word as positive, negative, object, animate, inanimate, edible, inedible)
- Cultural Training (identify Chinese cultural and historically significant figures, events, slogans, etc.)
These exercies should also be fully integrated as testing/exerciese features in individual lessons as well as the study center.
I can think of so many more, but I think this is a good starting point and, admittedly a very tall order. Not everything can be fully implemented the way I invision it, but, at least we can have goals, dreams, visions...like I said, in a perfect world...
Oh yeah, and Popup Groups would be another feature at the very top of my wish list.
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