text reading tool searched

[holger]

hej folks

I recently heard something about a quite intelligent application for learning written chinese but annoyingly i forgot the name that software.

It works somewhat as follows - you can paste any chinese text into a window and press play or so. then the software does nothing but highlighting words or phrases that are common and important for learners in different intensities of colors or so, while leaving rare or uncommonly used words black. And it also marks simply names, so the unknowing reader won't spend hours racking his brain about the meaning of those characters anymore.

For portioning the degree of importance that software simply uses data from one or more chinese language corpora, something that could also be done with any bigger search engine i think. I don't know if that program also has a translating function but thats not the point about it.

The strength to this concept may not be obvious at first sight. But those who have learned chinese to a certain degree of mastering some hundred most commonly used words and therefore recognizing the sentence structure and maybe parts of speech (noun, verb subj. object etc.) are faced with the next big question: which vocabulary should i learn first? How precious to have someone at your hand telling you: "ah forget about that word, no one says it anymore today but this one you really should remember!!"

of course you can rely on many didactically well composed books or teaching material, but the problem with those is: they are cause fatal boredom compared to having contact with real language if its music, webforum-talk or whatever. [real classroom teaching lessions are excluded from that citicism of course, they can be highly effective and great fun!]

So why not combine the advantage of linguistic data and teaching experience with the possibility to learn a (written) language the way one learns it best - wich is by reading stuff that interests you (or at least texts you selected yourself) ?

[chinesetools]

Maybe it was ChineseTA at http://www.svlanguage.com/

[onebir]

$389!!! That's outrageously expensive! Having said that it seems to do most of the stuff I thought software for learning chinese characters ought to do...

[trevelyan]

@Holger -- if you need to rely on color coding to tell you what words are common/uncommon, chances are that you're reading materials far above your level of comprehension. Maybe you'd be better served adjusting the difficulty of what you are reading downwards a notch?

What sort of materials are you reading, anyway?