Watch Chinese Characters - first Chinese study app on Apple Watch

[kroy123]

I've been building this simple app "Watch Chinese Characters" for the Apple Watch, it looks like this:

 

 

On your Apple Watch this will display the most common 150 Chinese characters (for between 2 to 20 seconds - you can change the display time) with their pinyin and basic pronounciations. In the current state this is very basic, but I'm looking for thoughts/feedback on how I could build this up to make a really effective study tool for learning Chinese on the Apple Watch. Any feedback would be appreciated - should I add more characters, give the user more options, maybe give the ability to display a longer definition etc? Of course I'm aware at this stage very few people have an Apple Watch

 

Link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/watch-chinese-characters/id981903733?mt=8

[Shelley]

I am not an Apple user so this is probably not for me but what about having a watch face in Chinese characters as a Standby mode so when you look at your watch and it isn't doing anything specific it could show you the time in Chinese characters,

 

I have an ordinary watch with Chinese characters on it, interestingly it uses the character set that is used for financial writing to avoid forgeries.

 

Good luck with your endeavor, it looks like a really good idea. Nice style and layout too.

[Demonic_Duck]

Yeah, the obvious example of a Chinese app for a smartwatch would be customisable watch faces. You could have various versions:

 

Standard forms

一、二、三、四、五、六、七、八、九、十、十一、十二

Full forms (simplified)

壹、贰、叁、肆、伍、陆、柒、捌、玖、拾、拾壹、拾贰

Full forms (traditional)

壹、貳、叁、肆、伍、陸、柒、捌、玖、拾、拾壹、拾貳

Earthly branches

子、丑、寅、卯、辰、巳、午、未、申、酉、戌、亥

(For earthly branches, each one is a period of 2 hours out of the 24 hour day, starting at 11pm. Examples of representing that on a watch face here.)

 

Not sure how much educational value that would have really, though. It'd mainly have aesthetic value. To slightly increase the educational value, you could also have options for changing the representation of dates/days of the week into Chinese without changing the overall language setting on the watch.

 

As for your original idea, one simple way to add more educational value would be to turn it into some kind of flashcard functionality. The simplest way of doing this would be to hide the English by default and allow the user to reveal it by touching a button, but of course you could go far beyond this - look at the popular flashcard apps out there at the moment for inspiration, such as Anki or Pleco's flashcard function.

[imron]

but I'm looking for thoughts/feedback on how I could build this up to make a really effective study tool for learning Chinese on the Apple Watch

Bear in mind that people aren't going to want to be looking at their watch for any great length of time (try holding your arm out in front of you for a minute and see how tired it gets).

 

I'm a little unsure how effective a study tool you can make with this sort of limitation.

[Demonic_Duck]

On the other hand, it's perfect for very short, fragmented chunks of time which otherwise can't usefully be used at all.

[mikelove]

Having had a Watch on my wrist for two days now, I tend to think it makes more sense as a controller / status display for audio-driven flashcards (hear Chinese and then English or hear English and then Chinese, a la Pimsleur) than as a standalone flashcard system.

 

It would be very useful to be able to check on your correct / incorrect count, mark words incorrect (though that could also be done by voice command), flag words for later review, pause / go back to review a recent word, etc - in fact that fills in a major missing piece in any "dynamic Pimsleur" type system - but as imron says, you're not going to want to be holding the watch in front of you for a prolonged period.

[Shelley]

@Demonic_Duck the link doesn't work for me

[Demonic_Duck]

Weird, it's just a link to Baidu search results.

 

Do an image search for 地支手表 on Google/Baidu/your search engine of choice and you'll see some examples.