New & Updated Features on Yoyo Chinese 3.0

A summary of all the important changes on the new Yoyo Chinese for legacy users of the old site.

Written by Tanner

Updated 6 months ago

*If you haven't already, make sure you read the announcement article we sent you with all the details about the release of the new Yoyo Chinese 3.0!*

General 🌱

The Study Streak tool now calculates your streak based on your own personal time zone, meaning you must complete a lesson before the end of your own 24-hour day to count your streak as complete. Read more here.

We've added another layer of progress tracking called your Yoyo Level that will track your accumulated experience points (XP) across all lessons and many activities on the site. Read more here.

We've added another new feature in the Me sidebar called Daily Goals. Unlike completing your Study Streak, you must completing a new lesson to complete your daily lesson goal. Daily goals are currently v1.0 of what we intend to do with the Goals section so expect some related updates in the future as well. Read more here.

Lessons marked with a gold medal are lessons you've already earned a 10/10 perfect quiz score on. If you earn a gold medal on each lesson in a Unit, that unit will also be marked with a gold medal for easy reference. Read more here.

The Study Stats section now be used to see how many lessons within each course you've completed, as well as the same for gold medals. You can also view your total number of mastered flashcards here. This is v1.0 of the new Study Stats section so you can expect future updates as well. Read more here.

You can now use Yoyo Chinese in dark mode! Dark mode is useful when your using the site at night or you may simply prefer it to the normal light mode. You can turn on dark mode by going to your new Settings page. Read more here.

The Chinese Grammar and Chinese Learning Tips video series, along with the other videos found in the old Resources > Reference Videos section, are currently available on the new website. You can access them here.

As mentioned in the announcement article, Yoyo Chinese 3.0 comes with a new pricing model as well. We will no longer be selling individual levels or courses and instead offer two options for new users: a recurring subscription or a one-time payment for lifetime access. You can check our pricing page here.

The practice activities on each lesson page are no longer locked behind the 'Start Practice' flow and separate pages like on the old site. You can use them while you watch the video and also take advantage of the new toggles to show/hide whichever part of the language you need for your studies. Read more here.

Because lecture notes are made using the audio review and are meant to be used alongside it, you will now find the lecture notes in the Audio tab on each lesson page that has an audio and lecture notes. If a lesson has lecture notes but no audio review, you'll find them in the Notes section. Read more here.

The discussion section has become the new FAQ section and rather than allow users to leave unmoderated comments of any kind, the section is dedicated only to questions and answers about the lesson content. (We may still add additional ways for users to comment and interact on the website in the future.) Read more here.

The new & improved Flashcards tool is a bit different from what it was on the old site. Rather than 'adding' the cards to your decks as you finish lessons, the entire Level's cards are already available in the deck right away. We made this change for two main reasons: a) the new SRS (spaced repetition system) 'smart' algorithm that helps choose which cards you should study next wouldn't work well if you could review such a small pool of a few cards from the Level, b) many users requested the ability to review the Level contents regardless of whether or not they had completed those lessons. So with this new system, we recommend that you complete a Level in Learn before doing the Flashcards in Mastery.
While reviewing flashcards either in the Practice mode or in the Mastery mode, you will now find new review settings that allow you to change what you see on each side of the cards as you review. For example, you can review cards by seeing the English first, then clicking reveal to show the Chinese characters and pinyin. Read more here.

The automatic typing tool that was previously available in the old quizzes has been done away with. It was problematic for many reasons and didn't work well on many browsers/devices as well as simply not being a good way to learn to type in Chinese. On the new site, you will need to install a Chinese keyboard on your device to answer questions in the quizzes that require typing in Chinese, which we recommend every Chinese language student does anyway so - win-win! Read more here.

There is a brand new section called Mastery inside which you'll find the new Flashcards tool. This tool is a big improvement over our previous SRS flashcards review tool. Make sure you check out the guide on the tool as it comes with quite a few changes! Read more here.

Anki flashcards are no longer available in the new Download Center and our recommended way for students to master the flashcards in the lessons is using the new Flashcards Mastery tool. Anki is not affiliated with Yoyo Chinese in any way and it was rather difficult for us to provide the tech support needed to send our users away to use Anki rather than Yoyo Chinese. It is possible we will provide Anki downloads in the future, but for now they not available.

The Pinyin Chart has gotten a facelift as well and now comes with a lot of new functionality like the ability to search any pinyin or select a single tone and listen to all sounds of that tone with a single click. You can learn how to pronounce Mandarin Chinese like a native by practicing with our audio demonstrations and video explanations for every possible sound combination in the language. Check it out here.

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