“Nei ge” is a variation of “na ge”.
I think they’re mostly (but not always) interchangeable IIRC.
Purple 35% the system seems to have gone haywire, repeating Aran’s comments virtually every other sentence.
Is it feasible to go back and finish the Beta Chinese course? I was on somewhere around Brown when I took a break to do HSK at the Confucius Centre but always with the intention of coming back to SSI.
On the other hand, does the new course recycle the same material, or is the content now largely different from the old course?. I don’t want to have to wade through the same material in the new course as I already did in the old cours in order to reach the point I was at before taking a break.
I would honestly do the new course. The old course was full of mistakes, including tone errors (as I confirmed with a native speaker).
In saying that, I’m a hypocite, because I’m redoing the old Italian course. 
Do you know whether the content is the same or not?
As for the tones, I had my doubts about them, and I’ll be testing the new course with a native speaker. I guess I’ll at least dip in to something, but I’m feeling pretty peed off with being treated like a child, and I think I may be better off working through the written forms and a Chinese grammar and relying on film and newspaper stuff and occasional contact with natives for the rest. Disappointing, because the real virtue of the method is potentially the spoken fluency that it offers. I haven’t analysed the vocabulary of the old course yet, but I’ve kept a written account of the content as I ve gone along, so I can look at word frequency and vocabulary bandwidth and see if my impression of a narrow bandwidth and chaotic frequency is justified.
Sorry to be grumpy!
I guess most people learning Chinese are.likely to be actually in a Chinese-speaking environment so perhaps the vocabulary drought and the clutter of incomplete utterances will be less of a problem, perhaps even a benefit. Pen Llyn however, isn’t exactly replete with Chinese speakers, and that may well be the situation of plenty of people headed for China and preparing for the experience in advance. Now I’m rambling…
I’m sorry. I don’t. I can say that the new Italian course is somewhat different from the old one but with a fair degree of overlap. I guess that’s likely true for the Chinese courses.
In what way treated like a child,
There’s no reason you should listen to my opinion but FWIW, I personally wouldn’t rush to fill up with vocabulary and reading and I would do the new course. A lot of the things you have listed as problems, I see as major plusses of these courses.
I think that’s even more true for a difficult language like Chinese than for an easy language like Italian.
Well thanks for your opinion, Martin, I do appreciate you taking the time to respond. And of course it’s great to have a forum in which to vent your feelings and express your opinions - I’m not sure to what extent other courses offer that facility.
But it’s horses for courses, isn’t it? You may prefer to take stuff in aurally and parrot it until at some point in the future it begins to make sense, that is if you ever get round to being in a scenario where the language environment around you does favour things beginning to make sense. (No longer probable in my case, though I have had quite a bit of rather chaotic exposure to Chinese). For me, I need the written form to remember stuff, and the aural/oral stuff is somehow fixed in the memory against that. Ideally of course the spoken form with all the vagaries of intonation and shifting pronunciation ( such as the weakened consonants in Chinese ) laced to the written forms. And that’s not available in Ssi Chinese at the moment unless you’re willing to invent your own Chinese characters course.
What is it that you see as strengths in what I see as problems?
Ah, I missed your comment about the content of the new Chinese course being probably largely parallel to the old one, Martin. Thanks.
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I can’t speak specifically to the Chinese course, but we have made some significant content changes in general…
…just checking on the details!..
The Chinese course in the new test app at saysomethingin.app is based on the new seed sentences, so it will have some significant changes - and it should also be much easier to navigate via belt level. 
We also have a bug report function in the new app to help us track down and solve content/voice problems - I think we need to activate it on a case by case basis - I’ll have a hunt for your account as soon as you let me know you’re on the new app
And we’re working on some ideas for teaching scripts - it’s not very simple, but we will get there.
My two-pennorth (not having tried any of the Chinese, but having done a number of other bits of different versions of SSi things…) I have a book on Romani which has pretty much defeated me because it had just so much vocabulary that I couldn’t learn it all, and couldn’t decide what to try to learn and what to leave out - I mean, I could probably give the metalworking technical terms and the translation of “stud donkey” a miss, but I still felt like I was drowning in too much vocabulary and not enough context.
As a counterpoint to that, I have found various SSi courses really fairly short on vocabulary, but (certainly with the Welsh) I found the conversational fluency led to me making much faster overall progress in the end. I did wish I had a bit more vocabulary earlier, so it perhaps wasn’t quite the sweet spot for me, but as you say - horses for courses.
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Thanks Richard, or should I say Gracias (no se si te acordarás de mi, pero nos conocimos por medio del español una década o mas atrás).I think you did your Welsh via the old course, which was substantially different from SSI’s recent suite of courses. For sure there are gains in the new approach, but I think there are also losses, one of which (and I think an unnecessary one) is the exclusion of those who like me remember language visually rather than aurally, in relation to the written word as some kind of reassuring anchor.
A large part of my purpose in learning Chinese is to speak to Chinese people, so I’m not going to be retreating into some limited world of the written language, romanised or otherwise. So Ssi Chinese will remain at least an occasional prop, but I need a wider range of vocabulary than SSI currently offers for beginners like myself. And Chinese may be “difficult” (i.e. different from Indo-European languages) but the apparent paucity of “grammar” (dangerous talk I know!) means that vocabulary is correspondingly more important. Yes, I’ll need somehow to create the language contexts that are missing from the SSI course, but that’s exactly what the course encourages us to do.
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Ah! I missed your comment about content, Aran. Thanks for the update.
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I’ll have a look and see if I think I’m on the new app or not. How new is it?
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Bingo! Basque! Hooray! I’m finding it via the website but I’m not sure I’m on an app as such.
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Again, I missed your reply, Martin, sorry! Yes, I obviously wouldn’t be guzzling up any old vocab - I’d be working of an English language frequency list and selecting from that the words that I feel I would be most likely to need in my proposed conversations. I’m lucky in that I have an informant, a professional translator and teacher of Chinese, who I can check occasional details with, though given the work pressure over there I wouldn’t want to abuse the facility. But in the absence of a “dip into a Chinese in the wild” scenario, I’m going to have to visualise possible situations where I would need appropriate vocabulary, as an alternative to the “Welsh in the wild” scene , much as Ssiw recommends anyway. And vocab is central to that, and the basis for constructing possible situations too. Together with a Chinese grammar of course. With SSI Chinese as an oral fluency support, what could possibly go wrong? (I did try putting some of my rendering of the Beta course into Google translate and came up with some very unexpected garbled results).
OK, dude. Well, I’ve shared my opinion that I think this is a really bad idea. I sincerely hope I’m mistaken and that you prove me wrong and I wish you well in your studies.