Practical Audio-Visual Chinese Dictionary and Flashcards

[Taiwan Monkey]

Hello,

I would like to share with you something I've been working on for quite some time. These are flashcards and a dictionary from all five volumes of the new edition of Practical Audio-Visual Chinese (新版實用視聽華語). This is the most popular book for learning Chinese in Taiwan, particularly at the National Taiwan Normal University Mandarin Training Center (國立臺灣師範大學國語教學中心, popularly known as Shida), although it is also used in many other places. More details about the books can be found here.

I am using these flashcards and dictionary with Pleco. If you are a Pleco user too, please see here for Pleco-specific instructions and download. In this thread I am only uploading the plain-text version, usable with any software.

Scope. Words appearing anywhere within the first four volumes, either in the textbook or copybook, are included (except technical pages). For the fifth volume, the list includes all words and proverbs from the textbook list for all chapters.

Definition format. Each entry is marked for the part of speech it represents. The abbreviations in use are explained below. If the word can appear as more than one part of speech, multiple abbreviations will be listed, separated with a comma (,), and the respective multiple definitions will be delimited by the semicolon (;) sign. If the entry is a compound that can be split in several parts, abbreviations for them will be listed, separated by a hyphen (-). The definition is followed by the book and chapter number, provided in square brackets ([ and ]). To simplify distinguishing parts of speech, verb definitions are always preceded by "to," and those of stative verbs are always preceded by "to be." Nouns are, however, not preceded by an article.

Additional notes:

• To make the most use of Pleco features, entries were trimmed not to exceed four characters. Wherever the entry is actually a part of a longer phrase, this will be mentioned in parentheses in the entry definition.
  
• Wherever there is more than one word with a given meaning, and both words are likely to be studied at the same time (i.e. they are in the same chapter or in the Extra subcategory for the same book), the definition provides a cue by revealing one (usually the first) letter of its pronunciation. This might be useful if you configure a test to only show the definition (without revealing pronunciation).
  
• This dictionary and flashcards only provide traditional (full-form, i.e. not simplified) characters. The pronunciation follows the book, which follows Taiwanese conventions. This sometimes means different tones, and sometimes may even mean entirely different sounds (as is in the case of 血 or 垃圾). The definitions are based on those provided in the book, but were significantly edited for clarity, or rewritten where incomprehensible. The list focuses on Taiwanese usage, and does not provide information on the Mainland Chinese pronunciation.

File format. There are two files inside the archive. Both are plain-text, UTF-8 encoded, without BOM (byte order mark, if you want it back, just open and save the file again in Windows Notepad). Each line is a new entry, in the standard Pleco format:

简体[繁體]<Tab>pin1yin1<Tab>definition

Please note this list does not include simplified characters, thus 简体 is equal to 繁體 for each entry. The difference between the files is that in the file AV Chinese Flashcards.txt, entries are grouped by category, with the following syntax:

// AV Chinese/Bn(/Lmm)

Where n is the volume number, and mm is a zero-padded chapter number. For example, the words from lesson 6 of book 3 can be found under the category AV Chinese/B3/L06. The words are categorized by book and chapter (for volumes 3 and 4) or by book only (for volumes 1 and 2). The additional subcategories AV Chinese/Bn/Extra (separate for each book) include words that appear outside the main word list (i.e. as footnotes, in the grammar section, in the supplementary exercises at the end of the chapter, or in the copybook) but were never included in the main word lists in any of the chapters, until the end of the last book. These words can be considered non-essential, and somehow random, but many are actually very useful, and will be necessary to understand grammar descriptions in Chinese. Entries are repeated if they belong to more than one category. On the contrary, in the file AV Chinese Dictionary.txt, each entry is listed only once, without any categories (book and lesson number is however still included as part of definition).

A request. Redistribution is fine, but please provide a reference to the original source thread on this forum, so that all the the users can learn about the most up-to-date version. Please report mistakes back in this thread, so they can be fixed for everyone. The current version is of November 10, 2010 and contains 4674 unique entries.

Hope you'll find it useful!

Part-of-speech abbreviations: A: adverb, AT: attributive, AV: auxiliary verb, CONJ: conjuction, CV: co-verb, DEM: demonstrative pronoun, I: interjection, IE: idiomatic expression, M: measure word (classifier), N: noun, P: particle, PRON: pronoun, PV: proverb (please note this is different than the system used in the book), RC: resultative compound, SV: stative verb, V: verb, VO: verb-object compound

AV Chinese Text (2010-11 Update).zip

[jbradfor]

Thanks for posting that!