🧠 Chinese Connections – A Daily Puzzle to Boost Your Vocabulary

If you’ve ever played the NYC game Connections, this is the same concept—just with Chinese characters!

Each day, I’ll share a 4×4 grid of 16 words. Your challenge: group them into 4 categories of 4. The twist? It’s all in Chinese.

The goal isn’t just to win—it’s to build your vocabulary in a fun, low-pressure way. I’ll keep the word choices beginner-friendly (think HSK 1–3) so everyone can play.

Here’s today’s puzzle:
狗　   本子　爸爸　苹果
书　   猫　    米饭　椅子
姐姐　笔　   鸟　    面条
哥哥　妈妈　鱼　   鸡蛋

Reply with your guesses or team up and solve together. I’ll post the answer + category explanations tomorrow! 🟩🟨🟦🟪

That's a cool idea. Also good to have an easy example for starters. I googled how to do spoilers on here, but it didn't work. That, I think, would be necessary for this kind of game.

Yesterday's Solution: 

 

Today's Puzzle: 
老师 苹果 飞机 水果
学校 火车 香蕉 医院
医生 香蕉 书包 书
西瓜 飞机 医院 学校

Based on jannesan's data, it seems like most people have read 《活著》by 余華. Here's a Chinese Connections puzzle of some Chapter 1 vocabulary. 

過去     孤獨     痛苦     勞動
飢餓     父親     失去     田地
希望     眼淚     妻子     命運
農民     兒女     母親     變故
 

There's a couple different ways I'd imagine but this is my guess: 

I've been thinking a lot about this concept and decided to formalize it into an actual game: https://bloomchinese.com/groupzi.

Right now, all the puzzles are pretty beginner friendly, but I think there's a lot of room to make multiple difficultly levels. 

@Wei-Ming 魏明 would love to hear your thoughts on this!

@Matthew Kao, I like the interface. Clicking is much more natural than copying and pasting. 

The ability to check each group individually made it a little too easy. Maybe the player should pick a color and then group items. She could switch colors and start a new group any time, even before the first group is done. 

@Wei-Ming 魏明 That's good feedback-- I'm finding the difficulty balances being the hardest aspect of the game design. 

If the user knows the vocabulary, it's too easy, but if the user doesn't know the vocabulary, it's too hard. I've found that the sweet spot is for HSK learners who are just learning the vocabulary, which might be too narrow of an audience. Although the concept is very similar to "NYT connections", the execution is quite different because NYT is specifically tailored for english native speakers and has more to do with where the word is placed in the real world or the connections that are tied to the word. 

I'm worried that at the end of the day it becomes a glorified test of whether you know the vocabulary or not. 

I've been trying to brainstorm ways to make it more applicable to a broader range of beginners who may not know the words while still making it genuinely fun and not "learning-disguised-as-fun"

Thanks again for your thoughts!