Character Mine

[Richard J]

The board admin staff have been kind enough to let me post about a new shareware program I have written, so I hope it will be of interest to someone here. The program can be downloaded and used for free without any time restrictions. I would be very interested in receiving feedback from anyone who gives it a try.

In brief, it is a Windows .NET program which I have developed for myself in my efforts to learn Chinese characters. What follows is a brief description of its main features, but if you prefer to watch a five minute video demo you can see it at www.charactermine.com. The main idea is that it is a daily self-test program which continually encourages the user to see the new words they are adding, or the words they are testing themselves on, in the context of the characters they have already studied. Every time an answer is presented you see a list of all the other instances of that character in your personal database. These related items can either be added back into your main test list, edited, or recursively searched in terms of the characters they contain. Extra features include testing with different Chinese fonts and one-click Google/Baidu image search.

I will be very happy to consider any suggestions for improvements or new features, as well as import/export routines for compatibility with existing programs.

Cheers,

Richard Jefferies

[HerrPetersen]

Hi Richard,

I watched the video. I like the idea behind the data-base-structure, and making connections around the items you know.

However I feel that for the "review" function there are already very well working programs around, such as anki among others. There is also a large number of plugins already available for anki, which can do partly what your program seems to do.

[Richard J]

Hi Petersen,

Thanks for your comments about the program. I agree with your point that any self-testing "review" type program will always share a lot of functionality with existing programs that do the same job. I often think programming is like making shoes. Any two pairs of shoes will have much in common because shoes are all made to do the same job, but this does not stop people making more shoes, or looking for the ones they find most comfortable to wear.

Most programs begin life being written for their programmers' own use, and reflect their needs and tastes. One thing about Anki is that it is primarily designed for hand held computers, so when you run it on a desktop it does not occupy much space. On the other hand Character Mine is designed to make maximum use of the available screen space, and renders text in the largest and clearest font sizes practical. I don't mind admitting that this is because I suffer from short-sightedness. I am sure there are a few other people out there who will also appreciate the big fonts, while others will probably find them a nuisance.

I took a good look at Anki because you mentioned it, and I am very impressed by its flexibility. I noticed that the available downloads for it included not just other languages, but also flash cards for studying many other subjects, even medicine. I could see how it would be very useful even for someone who does not normally use a hand held device, for example when they go on vacation, so I added an export routine from Character Mine to Anki. While doing this I noticed something interesting. Anki can import tab-separated text files, or it lets the user define their own data template. It then stores its data in SQLite database files (it gives them a .anki extension), where it does a clever trick. One table in the database holds the data in the cards, while another table holds the metadata about the structure of that data. For example, a Chinese program might use five or six fields, while a set a flash cards for studying enzymes might need twenty. Anki can handle both scenarios with equal ease because the data structure recorded in the second table tells it how to interpret the raw data in the first one. This allows great flexibility, although I am not sure you can get your data out of Anki as easily as you can get it in. (I might have overlooked something though, I am posting on Anki's own forum about this).

I can imagine that most students of Chinese will want to transfer their data from one program to another at some time. This could be because like Anki it is suited to a particular kind of device, or because it offers better exercises in a particular area (practising stroke order for example), or because it is favoured by a particular teacher and it is the format in which they give out their supplementary course vocabulary, or for some completely different reason. With this in mind I am in the process of trying to extend the Character Mine import/export routines to be able to share with as many other programs as possible. I just added ZDT (which was very easy indeed because it supports a single predefined data format), and the format for Praxis ChinesePod XML vocabulary files. At the moment you can export to Anki but not import from it.

As I said before, I would really appreciate any suggestions about how to improve the program. If anyone wants to give it a try and would like to use data they have locked up in a different program then please post back here.

Cheers

[raydpratt]

Hello Mr. Jefferies:

It took a little to find you, and I hope that you are still following this old post (which is unlikely, but it's a good shot).

I am studying Mandarin Chinese with Pimsleur's audio program, and I'm up to Part 2, lesson one, which is just over the half-way mark (I've completed the 30 lessons of Part 1A and 1B), and I saw your program, Character Mine, on CNET, and I wanted to download it among the other Chinese programs that interested me. However, the downloader there has horrible promises to give me a default spam browser for life, so I've been backtracking to the companies themselves and downloading from there. Your company's website, Orphalese Data Solutions, doesn't mention the Character Mine program that you created.

As an aside, your tarot-card program is interesting to me because I want to create a program in javascript to wash and shuffle cards in user-defined ways, including machine shuffles, and then to create user-defined, variable numbers of blackjack players who either play or depart from Basic Strategy to variable degrees so that I can begin to explore a card-pattern-based hueristic for determining the general favorability of games, and at which positions of play, and whether to stay or leave depending on what other players do to the reliability of any patterns. Your program spreads cards and shuffles them, and so you are not far from adding a visual wash and an initial dealer shuffling process. I've started learning some C so that I can better understand the javascript syntax based in C, so I'm hoping that your tarot program is written in a language that I can figure out.

Aside from that aside, Good Sir -- do you still have a working Windows 7 copy of of your Character Mine? 我 想 学 中 文. 谢 谢，你。

I also noticed that you were in Spain. Yo puedo hablar el epañol mejor que el chino, pero voy a cambiarlo.

Very Respectfully,

Ray Donald Pratt

[imron]

The site referenced in the first post www.charactermine.com, still appears to be valid, and the download page there has executables updated as recently as this month, so my suggestion would be to try there.

[raydpratt]

Thank you, Imron,

I downloaded it and the help files and the dictionary, but I'll probably have to learn more about it and redo it to get them all working together. Nonetheless, I got it.

Thank you.