the thousand words

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Ten lessons that teach 中文 and the typing of it together. The words are ordered by how often the language actually uses them, so the first lessons are not baby steps — they are the thousand words most worth owning. Clear a lesson by meeting its accuracy gate, not by finishing it.

0 / 1000 words typed correctly at least once

  1. 1 First words The hundred words no sentence happens without. The reading sits under every character: read it, type it, pick the right character from the candidates. gate: 90.0% accuracy  ·  20 words a run start
  2. 2 Guided words The pool widens to four hundred, and the meaning joins the reading on every card — you are learning the words now, not just producing them. gate: 93.0% accuracy  ·  25 words a run start
  3. 3 The thousand The full thousand most useful words, with the pinyin shown and watched. The reading sits under every character, and the letters you press are checked against it as you type — get the spelling wrong and you see it before the candidates do. Runs here fill the mastery meter. gate: 95.0% accuracy  ·  30 words a run start
  4. 4 Word to phrase The same words inside the collocations they actually travel in — the verb with its object, the measure word with its noun. gate: 95.0% accuracy  ·  15 phrases a run start
  5. 5 Your misses The words you personally fumble, drilled until they stop being yours. Signed in, this lesson is built from your own record; as a guest it is a mixed review. gate: 95.0% accuracy  ·  20 words a run start
  6. 6 Sentences Whole sentences built from the thousand, with the grammar words doing real work — and the full-width punctuation that is also part of typing Chinese. gate: 94.0% accuracy  ·  6 sentences a run start
  7. 7 Passages Real prose, untimed. Accuracy carries; the speed will follow. gate: 96.0% accuracy  ·  100 characters of prose start
  8. 8 On the clock The same prose with a pace to hold: fifty characters a minute, without letting the accuracy slip. gate: 96.0% accuracy at 50 cpm  ·  120 characters of prose start
  9. 9 Your genre Business, story, legal — the prose your own days are made of. Pick the genre; the gate stays the same. gate: 96.0% accuracy at 50 cpm  ·  120 characters of prose start
  10. 10 Mastery Sixty seconds of real text, held at speed and accuracy together. Pass this and the language is yours to type. gate: 97.0% accuracy at 80 cpm  ·  60 seconds of prose start

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