Chinese learning Software

[jdangu]

Dear All,

Some months ago I presented my Chinese learning software, Learn Chinese 2003.

Thanks to the support of many enthusiastic users I'm glad to announce the second version in this forum.

Features Summary

- Your personal wordlists

- A selection of 400 characters representing 70% of commonly used characters.

- A 16,000 characters dictionary

- Pinyin pronunciation for all characters

New features

- A comfortable user interface

- A new Toolbar

- Configurable list boxes

- Right click on your list to add / remove and more

- Change fonts : If you have installed Office, you can use SimHei for example, instead of MingLiu

- Resizable window, your custom size is automatically saved

- "Open list" / "Save list" more comfortable (date follow-up, support for long descriptions)

- A comprehensive help

- New quizzes !

- Character from pronunciation

- Pinyin tone from pronunciation

- Added a registration wizard

Fixed problems

- The word list is now hidden during quizzes

- When the current list is empty, quizzes and stats are warning you.

- Quiz engine recoded for more reliability

- Lots of Minor bug fixes

Check http://www.lchinese.com for the list of features !

Kind Regards,

Jerome Dangu.

[Haoqide]

All you programmers in these forums make me sick! In an envious, 'wow, that's really cool that you can and are doing that' kind of way. Keep up the good work guys!

Will this be ported to Linux by any chance??? I'd love to see something like that.

[jdangu]

Unfortunately I would not be able to provide the same quality in a reasonable time under Linux

Thanks for the comment

[jdangu]

Hello everybody,

This message is just to let you know that I continue to update my app. It's now version 2.1 and you'll find the news here : http://www.lchinese.com

It's a nice assistant to help you learning Chinese characters. I'm also open to enhancement suggestions.

Kind Regards,

Jerome Dangu.

[count_zero]

This doens't work on my version of Windows XP. I get an unexpected error when trying to install: "Please check file access permissions"

[jdangu]

Please join us on

http://www.lchinese.com/forums

Explain your problem in detail and we'll try to fix it up for you.

[jdangu]

Hello people !

I'm glad to introduce Learn Chinese 2003 version 3.0 with the coolest character writing features ever

see the live demo here :

http://cryptopowah.online.fr/lcdemo.html

and download it here :

http://www.download.com/Learn-Chinese-2003/3000-2279_4-10365298.html?tag=lst-0-18

home page :

http://www.lchinese.com

Regards,

Jerome

[Chappie]

No offence but its easy to create this kind of program. It gonna be hard if you want to port this to linux. Its written in C++? .Net? or something form MS right?

If its written in Java (Im a Java programmer, and learning php now) you dont need to port to linux then anyway good luck with programming.

[trevelyan]

I think it's a good idea, although the "without effort" pitch on the homepage seems a bit overboard.

The ability to draw chinese characters in English-only Windows environments is useful. Is the code for that open source and/or portable to non MS platforms such as Java?

[rockytriton]

It's lacking... Here's my quick thoughts on it. I see you have a message board so I'll post it there too:

Please don't take this post as just taking a hit at your software, I do like it, but it is lacking some places....

1. You need to let the user read and then enter pinyin as an answer. This seems to be how to learn to recognize the characters better outside of this program. For instance, you show the character and then they input the pinyin, if it matches one of the pinyin spellings for the character, then it's correct of course.

2. It only supports one character at a time? I'm not sure if this really is a limitation but it seems like it is. If the user expects to learn chinese from the software, they need to be able to recognize characters together and their meanings, like 明白，知道， etc... Without this, the software should be called "Memorize chinese characters 2003".

3. The limitation is very limiting, too limiting in fact. From my experience in developing and selling shareware, you will not get any kind of market support if you give out a very limited version. I have always had much better support in spreading the software around and getting more purchases when the user had a full, time limited version of the software. I usually choose 30 days because that gives plenty of time for a decent evaluation.

4. The menus don't behave properly. They don't stay open when moving between menus like any ordinary windows application, they instead make me click like crazy just to view menus. While this may sound like nit-pickings, it's these kind of things that discourage users from buying the software. They feel that any legitimate company would take care of these kinds of details and would not just ship it out and hope people will start buying it. Too many people lack on the user interface and they forget that the user interface is your interface to the user who may want to buy the software!

5. You need to do some multi-threaded programming on the "animate character" screen. I tried clicking play while it was moving and then tried to move the window and then it just froze completely and had to be end tasked. You could also probably do well by just putting in a PeekMessage/TranslateMessage/DispatchMessage inside of your code that does the painting, this works just as well as using multiple threads in some cases.

6. This is probably just because I didn't read the help file but you will learn that during evaluations, a lot of users don't read the help when they get frustrated, they just delete the app and find something else... I can't figure out the Hanzi game, even after clicking the "help" button on the game window it didn't make sense... Am I supposed to guess the character from the pinyin without seeing the character, it seems I have to chose one that's not even showing, it just doesn't make sense to me.

7. You should probably name your new version "Learn Chinese 2005" people are more willing to buy shareware if they feel it's being updated and it gives the impression that you haven't updated it in 2 years! If I were you, I'd stay away from using the year in a version number alltogether, Microsoft learned that lesson too.

Ok, well, I hope you actually read this and take this into consideration. The software has great potential I think, and I love the part which shows you how to write the character, it's very good.

[browny]

To be honest, you can't sell this software. 楼上说的对, 这个软件很滥啊

[jdangu]

Constructive feedback is always welcome.

On the other hand I'm used to dealing with smart guys who bash at others people work for pleasure. Fortunately they are a very small minority.

[rockytriton]

Would you consider creating a time limited full featured demo? I would like to check out the software more but I really can't do much with the limitation.

[mandarinboy]

Maybe i am wrong but are not the data for the stroke order animations from Todd David Rudicks project kanjidict? Since there are 1440 animations i am rather sure they are. In that case there is one dilemma, Kanji and hanzi are not written the same in all cases. In some cases the Japanese have choosen a different aproach. Very small differeces but still not the same. It is also licensed under GNU =

General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you

have the freedom to distribute copies of free software

(and charge for this service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things.

For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether

gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that

you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the

source code.

Basicaly, if you use GNU in your project, your code will also be GNU licensend and we all can ask for the source code. That is maybe not the ideal situation if you want to sell your software. I know that many programs are using this code.

still, it is a very nice feature and useful in many ways and i might be wrong in the origin since i have not checked your code, only the number of entries

[rockytriton]

where can I find this project at?

[mandarinboy]

You can find it athttp://www.cs.arizona.edu/japan/JavaDict/README.html#Credits

It is a wounderful code and are used in many applications. It have inspired many other applications developers.

[jdangu]

Maybe i am wrong but are not the data for the stroke order animations from Todd David Rudicks project kanjidict?

Well no, it's based on the dragon-char community project as mentioned in the software. It is indeed another GPL project, but for Palm.

I don't know about the kanjidict project you're referring to.

Basicaly, if you use GNU in your project, your code will also be GNU licensend

You mean GPL ?

I know the deal. In this case, the code is mine and the data is GPL. I didn't modify the data and I specified that it was released under GPL. This interpretation of GPL'd products redistribution is shared among major linux ditributors (for example) and has been agreed by the GNU fundation.

Regards

Jerome

[mandarinboy]

Sorry, yes GPL. To much Linux lately

Still, the code from Dragon.data/dragon-char are licenced under GPL. Take a look at this extract from the GPL licence:

When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not

price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you

have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for

this service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it

if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it

in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things.

To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid

anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights.

These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you

distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it.

For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether

gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that

you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the

source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their

rights.

We protect your rights with two steps: (1) copyright the software, and

(2) offer you this license which gives you legal permission to copy,

distribute and/or modify the software.

Also, for each author's protection and ours, we want to make certain

that everyone understands that there is no warranty for this free

software. If the software is modified by someone else and passed on, we

want its recipients to know that what they have is not the original, so

that any problems introduced by others will not reflect on the original

authors' reputations.

Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software

patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free

program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the

program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any

patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.

This is the problem with it. Yes, you can charge for distribution of a software but anyone can ask for the source code.

As for codes, it doesnt matter if they are from one or the other project, they are both GPL anyway.

The intention have never been to give coders access to free code to be used in commercial softwares.

If you look at e.g Red Hat you can choose to buy the software on disk and get suport or download the

source code and compile it your self. If you use GPL in your software you do also need to make it possible

for us to download your source code.

Since i like your stroke order data, i would like to have a look at your source code, please.

[mandarinboy]

You mean GPL ?

I know the deal. In this case, the code is mine and the data is GPL. I didn't modify the data and I specified that it was released under GPL. This interpretation of GPL'd products redistribution is shared among major linux ditributors (for example) and has been agreed by the GNU fundation.

This is under debate. The data is the soul purpose of this project. It is like e.g. a dictionary. Is it he software used to create the data or the data it self that is GPL? Since you made an add on that used the data, the add on should be GPL.

Well, for the future, i have my self made a different approach to this subject and created a database with stroke order data. It contains today around 1700 characters and are growing. This one comes with no GPL licence.

[mandarinboy]

I like the idea with stroke order recognition, have you seen this software http://www.incors.com/tejina/screenshot2.php3

They are using it in a rather nice way. Written in java but with a very nice interface for the writing. There is also one Chinese software, i do not have the link in my head. They have one very nice feature. For each accepted stroke, they erase your stroke and replace it with a smoother predefined one. That way the character will look like a real caligrapth have written it. I liked that idea. Even though it is nice with pen figures it is nice to view perfect strokes. Just an idea. It helps the student a lot to be able to practice on stroke orders.