I have a few friends who are learning Mandarin (and a few who cheated and just got born Chinese), and I've been thinking about ways of practising with them, without actually practising and Chinese sentence scrabble is my current idea.

Obviously Chinese has no western style alphabet so creating words doesn't work that well (true you can use radicals to build characters but that's not what I'm after). I think creating full sentences, with a character on each tile instead of a letter would work. Instead of working with vowels and consonants, you play with nouns, verbs, particles etc. Play and score it exactly like traditional scrabble except your going for grammatically complete sentences instead of correctly spelled words.

For the tile scores I think making personal pronouns such as 我 and 你, and common particles such as 的 and 了worth one point like vowels. The rest you can guess a point value based on usage up to 10 like normal letters.

For compound words where each character isn't ever seen separately I think it might work better to have them as 1 tile as otherwise you might be stuck with a completely useless tile (and then whoever picks up the other half will also be stuck so your both forever unable to play them). Words where the two parts are both commonly used else where such as 一下 and 吃饭 you'd probably want to keep on separate tiles.

In order for this to work you really need to play with a native speaker who can judge the correctness of a sentence, this wouldn't work with two beginners. But if you can get a judge, I think it could work as a game, and be great practise for reading and creating sentences without it feeling at all like study.

I'm sure I can't be the first person to ever suggest this but a quick look on google didn't find much. It will take some tweaking to get the scoring and the number of copies of each tile somewhat balanced but I think it could work.

Anyone else tried this? Or see a massive hole in my logic?

Well, the hole in your logic is that there are thousands and thousands of characters, which would make the tiles bag pretty big and heavy...

It sounds like it could be a fairly cool idea at a total beginner level, though - limited to maybe 50-100 characters for absolute beginners. Once people got more advanced with Chinese, though, keeping the tile set up to their level would be nightmarish. I guess you could have a basic set of necessary characters and then supplement it with topic- or level-appropriate vocabulary for higher levels, but the scope of the sentences you'd be producing would be pretty limited.

If you're thinking of making you're own Chinese version of a boardgame, I would definitely suggest doing an Apples to Apples sort of thing. As FatDragon points out, keeping the vocabulary up to your level in scrabble would be a nightmare, but with Apples to Apples, you can always add more cards to your deck, or make small changes and reprint cards you're already using.

If you don't know the game, it's basically a game of matching nouns and adjectives. There are noun cards, which have a single noun, and adjective cards, which have an adjective and a number of synonyms. One player randomly draws an adjective card. All other players have a hand consisting of various nouns, from which they pick the best matching card they have to submit for judging. The Judge, who drew the adjective card, looks at all the nouns and awards the adjective card to the person who put forth the best noun.

They've printed English, Spanish, and I think German versions. Unfortunately, no Chinese.

I actually recently played a Mandarin version of cranium, which was quite fun, but was designed for native speakers. But anything like Pictionary/Charades is also good practice.

Seems like it could work as an online game, where you could have settings like how many characters and what level to include in the tiles. I would definitely try it!

@Fat Dragon: Very true it will only work for beginners with limited vocabulary - I should have stated that that's exactly what I am and I'm fine with it being pretty limited. I certainly have no wish to print and cut out 55,000 tiles, but most sentences are in the subject predicate" or "subject verb object" style and that you can practise with a very limited set of words. If I can create "我喜欢面包“ then later I can swap bread for roast chicken and still have gained something from the practise ... at least that's how it works in my head :P

@蓓蕾: I'm more interested in correct grammar at this point, though the Apples to Apples does also sound like a nice idea. Memorising new words, or practising reading is something you can easily do solo, but when generating complete sentences you really need feedback (of a native speaker if at all possible).


I think I'll try to print up a trial set in the next week and give it a go. I'm sure if nothing else it'll be fun to find out how much it fails :)

If you have access to native speakers, why not simply have a conversation with them and have them correct your grammar? You can structure the conversation if you don't have enough things to talk about - tell a story, describe a dream you had, talk about old girlfriends, whatever.

As for Scrabble, I played a Spanish version way back when as an educational game and I thought it was kind of slow. When the students played they came up with very basic stuff; only once in a while when the native speakers played did you see anything moderately challenging, but since they didn't want to be jerks and completely destroy the non-natives, they also usually kept it pretty simple. So if you're going to try to make a fun game out of it, you should do something about that inherent imbalance between natives and non-natives.

James

I saw some Chinese crosswords in a magazine here once. Those looked amazingly difficult.

does anyone know of any beginners online games like character mahjong or scrabble(simple) ?

For chemistry there's a great mahjong ios app from one of the US uni's
http://itunes.apple.com/pk/app/mahjong-chem/id416482474?mt=8


Just learning resultative clauses in the course I'm doing.
Course is using a mix of textbooks - NPCR and Short term spoken chinese.

theres an iphone app that gives you characters and you have to try to make the most number of 2/3/4 character words/phrases/expressions.

The target was around 20 in 2 minutes

I was lucky to get 5

unfortunatly the name of the app escapes me