ZDT: Make a Chinese version of ZDT

[peterjez]

Hello Chris,

I was wondering if you ever thought about making this program useable by China Chinese learning English, and not only for learners of Chinese. I showed this program to a lot of my friends when I was in China and they said that they wished that they could use it -- but the English interface is a huge barrier to acceptance.

I think you could get more people interested in the program and push development forward at a faster pace if you open the scope a little.

[bogleg]

I think internationalizing the ZDT would be a good idea. It will take a bit of manual work on my part and I would need someone to help me do the translations. But are all you talking about just translating all the english text to chinese? Or were you looking for additional functionality that would aid english learning?

Chris

[peterjez]

I think that most of the functionality is there. I think the only thing that would be missing would be the pronunciation of English. The Chinese have this special alphabet that they use to pronounce English words. I think you'd have to find a different dictionary to support that.

The only reason I say it is because a lot of Chinese try to learn English the way they learn Chinese characters. They write it over and over and over again. I think that having flash cards gives another level of efficiency

Another thing I wanted to tell you was that I took Chinese at MIT, and they were promoting this internal tool that some graduate student wrote called Flash Cube. It was basically the same thing as what you have here -- only you've made managing flash cards a lot easier. They also made it kinda like a proprietary tool -- so once I graduated I couldn't use it anymore. Do you know if a lot of educators are using ZDT?

[bogleg]

Is Flashcube really proprietary? I was able to download it from here.

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Foreign-Languages-and-Literatures/21F-101Spring-2006/StudyMaterials/index.htm

Anyway, I have no idea if any educators are using the ZDT. If they are, they haven't told me.

Chris

[ipsi()]

Java makes localizing stuff pretty damn easy . Once you've got it set up, it would be pretty simple to have someone translate it for you, providing there aren't too many different phrases. And once you've set up localization, it's not hard to add support for other languages.