Character Trading Card Game

[ParkeNYU]

I am working on an educational card project that will ultimately be 'gamified' and hopefully fun to collect and trade. Right now, I just have an MS-Paint prototype of the card layout and content, and I'm still trying to think of a way to make it into a competitive game for the sake of expedited and enjoyable learning. I'm hoping some of you will have some ideas to bring to the table...

 

I decided to keep only the most important information, so as not to overwhelm the learner, yet still leaving enough content to return to in the advanced stages. This includes:

<Obverse side>

1) The traditional character in KangXi font

<Reverse side>

1) The traditional character in 'regular' font, annotated with stroke numbers and highlighted radical

2) The radical header, along with the radical number and residual stroke-count below it

3) Up to four 'combining' forms for radicals and two commonly encountered variants for non-radicals

4) The Late Middle Chinese (Tang-Song) reading(s) in PRime (diaphonemic) format.

5) The National Pronunciation(s) (ROC Standard Mandarin) in Zhuyin format.

6) The English definition(s)

Radicals will be marked with their appropriate index numbers, phonetic-loan characters will be marked with their original definitions, and picto-ideograms, semantic compounds, and semantic-phonetic compounds will be colour-coded. Please note that the reverse side of each card is divided into three regions: Character (top-half), Reading (bottom-half left), and Definition (bottom-half right); this strict segregation of information makes it easier to consistently cover certain sections during a student's revision. Since ROC citizens surely haven't the need for English definitions, I was considering providing them with brief Chinese definitions and example words (character compounds) instead.

 

There is no doubt that some of you will first wonder why only Mandarin and Middle Chinese readings are given. Given that Mandarin is the national language of the ROC and PRC, adding one or two other Chinese topolects, dialects, or sino-xenic languages is essentially opening Pandora's Box; it wouldn't be fair to include some and not others, and doing so would completely crowd the cards and dissuade learners. The Middle Chinese pronunciations are included precisely for those people who wish to learn non-Mandarin readings of Chinese characters. I've found that I can predict Cantonese readings, for example, with near-perfect accuracy using a combination of Mandarin and Middle Chinese readings. As for Hanyu Pinyin's exclusion, I prefer to use Roman/Latin letters only for English to keep it visually distinct. Also, my primary audience will be Taiwanese people and foreign learners of Mandarin. This is because I am selecting characters from the Republic of China Ministry of Education's primary list of 4808 common Chinese characters 'necessary for adult literacy'; I am adding the 52 missing radicals to this list for a total of 4860 characters, and thus 4860 cards. I am leaning towards Taiwan because I hope to get approval and assistance from their Ministry of Education. In the meantime, I am actually more interested in working with Glossika on this, since they are much harder workers and have considerably more motivation to get things done (and are also based in Taiwan). If this idea were to ultimately take off, I could even imagine including bar/QR codes or chips so that they could be scanned, allowing infinitely more information about each character to be revealed digitally. Although the entire project could work to some degree as a self-contained app, I prefer physical cards, perhaps because I'm old-fashioned. For the 4860 cards, I envision 81 decks (one starter plus 80 levels), each with 60 cards, with the student learning ten characters per day, six days per week (the seventh day being reserved for cumulative review); at this rate, all characters can be learned within 1.5 years.

 

Below is the MS-Paint prototype (when I get better at using Photoshop and/or InDesign, the cards should look a lot better too):

 

Since 4860 is a massive number, I was hoping that Photoshop and/or InDesign could accommodate placeholders into which I could automatically insert information en masse using a custom program of some kind.

[edelweis]

IMHO not having Pinyin is not a good marketing decision.

I like the cards but I wouldn't buy them without pinyin.

 

"my primary audience will be Taiwanese people" => you should have the definitions in Chinese for them, no?

[ParkeNYU]

Yeah, the same could be said for not including simplified characters. Also, sometimes the mainland pronunciation differs from Taiwan's... In essence, this is a 'cardification' of MoE-Dict. I wouldn't mind making a parallel series with simplified characters, Hanyu Pinyin, and mainland pronunciations (I'd only need about 3000 cards, too... I could even get rid of the variants and radicals).

 

Also please note my previous statement: "Since ROC citizens surely haven't the need for English definitions, I was considering providing them with brief Chinese definitions and example words (character compounds) instead."

[edelweis]

ah I missed that part about the Chinese version.

 

Anyway, for the foreigners version:

for me not having simplified characters is not a major drawback, but not having the Pinyin is.

You're depriving yourself of all the foreign students who started to learned using simplified/pinyin and want a deck with traditional/pinyin when they want to go to Taiwan or just switch to traditional characters for whatever reason.

Having had a taste of pinyin IME, are they likely to want to switch to zhuyin IME?

 

Anyway. That's my 2cents. As I said your cards are attractive. I might want some of this type with traditional/pinyin.

[ParkeNYU]

I suppose, to me at least, learning both Zhuyin and Pinyin fluently is 0.01% of the difficulty of learning both traditional and simplified characters. Even if the student learned Pinyin first (like me), learning Zhuyin for the sake of the cards is not even three days of work for someone who knows Pinyin fluently (it's even considerably easier than learning Hangeul, which can purportedly be learnt in a day). Hanyu Pinyin is now the official Romanisation in Taiwan, and it really helps to know it for typing more easily, but learning both seems like an infinitesimal chore.

 

Even aside from my personal bias, it seems odd to me that a student would want to learn traditional characters without learning Zhuyin as well, unless that student is learning Cantonese for Hong Kong and Macau, in which case the lack of Cantonese is a whole different problem. If Taiwan or anything related to Taiwan is the goal, Zhuyin would have been a necessary step anyway. Of course, that does not preclude one from learning Pinyin. In fact, I firmly believe that even Taiwan-leaning people should learn Pinyin for typing and other uses. I just don't see it as a one-or-the-other scenario. For example, Kana is necessary for Japanese (more difficult to learn), but knowing Romaji for typing is still essential (it might even be the same situation for Hangeul and Romaja).

 

Looking at the situation squarely, the vast majority of people who insist on Hanyu Pinyin will be the same people who insist on simplified characters and mainland readings (I think that you're the exception to the rule). That being said, traditional versions could be put into small bubbles on a dedicated pinyin/simplified/mainland/3000 card series.

[edelweis]

Traditional versions in small bubbles seems impractical (illegible) ?

I'd like to have big traditional characters.

 

People learning Mainland Mandarin might want to learn traditional characters in order to be able to read calligraphy,  or ancient poems in the original form... not necessarily having an interest in Zhuyin.

 

And even the people who do want to learn Zhuyin at some point, why not help them by adding the Pinyin next to the Zhuyin?

[ParkeNYU]

I understand your point, but as you can see, it would be difficult to find space for the pinyin without crowding the card (especially because pinyin is horizontal and the pronunciation section is vertical). For most cards, there would indeed be plenty of space, but when we get to characters like 樂 and 著, that space essentially disappears. Also, it would basically be repeating identical information but in a different form, which itself is a waste of space.

 

People learning mainland Mandarin would certainly benefit from learning to recognise traditional characters, but they wouldn't necessarily ever have to write them. I think for your interests, a mainland series with traditional characters added would be perfect. They don't have to be that small, after all; I could re-size the dimensions. Correct me if I'm mistaken, but you essentially want to learn Mainland Mandarin but also have fluid and ample access to the traditional forms, right?

[Hofmann]

Why 康熙 forms? Also, if you work with the ROC MOE, they'll probably make you use standard forms.

[edelweis]

Yes that's it,

I'm learning Mandarin with mostly Mainland resources (so, simplified characters and pinyin),

but I also want to be able to:

read Taiwanese newspapers and books and websites,

exchange emails and postcards with Taiwanese people,

read (and maybe write) calligraphy,

etc.

I don't think that is a very exceptional approach, I'm sure there are plenty of people with such interests.

 

I don't necessarily object to Zhuyin but I also don't see the point of learning it when I have a perfectly fine transcription system and IME at my disposal already.

 

As to the Middle Chinese and other things, I don't need them at this point, but possibly some day I might want them...

 

 

 

Edit: actually, now that I think about it: in many universities (not in China) students taking Chinese as a major are required to learn to read both Simplified and Traditional. Also true apparently for an American defense test.

Which means, that those students will learn to read both sets of characters, and learn to write either simplified or traditional, but most probably they will learn only one phonetic transcription scheme, pinyin of course.

 

I don't have Glossika. For me it's a given that they have pinyin. Do they also have Zhuyin, I don't know.

Pleco has pinyin.

Even the TOCFL vocabulary is offered with pinyin.

[wibr]

On a technical note, Paint is really the worst program to do such a project. From my own experience I can recommend Inkscape, which is free. You could design one card as a template and automatically generate all cards with a simple script. That would require some basic programming knowledge, but it's really not that difficult since Inkscape natively works with svg, which is just a text file. You can also do something like that in InDesign, although I don't how exactly, probably with xml import. If you take the template approach it would also be very easy to generate different styles with different info, some with pinyin, some with this font, some with that font, whatever you want.

[ParkeNYU]

@wibr

Thanks, I will try out Inkscape!

 

@edelweis

Actually, I use Hanyu Pinyin to type Zhuyin to type Hanzi...if that makes sense. It's basically the same as typing Romaji to type Kana to type Kanji. Although Zhuyin is nicer-looking, more phonologically consistent, and easier for me to read, I concede that Hanyu Pinyin is certainly easier to type. For your needs, I might design a mainland version of the cards with decently-sized traditional forms. They won't have stroke counts or radicals though, because the assumption is that users like you want to type and recognise them in reading, and not necessarily write them by hand. Am I wrong? As far as calligraphy goes, you'd have to learn a lot more than traditional forms anyway.

 

@Hofmann

I want to provide both KangXi and 'regular' fonts to showcase the greatest possible differences in printed/handwritten fontal variations for the benefit of the learner. I do plan on using the ROC MOE's standard forms (once I get the proper fonts).

[edelweis]

Sorry, I'm interested in the cards with Traditional stroke order AND pinyin.

 

I absolutely can't believe that Glossika would support cards with English definitions but without pinyin.

Feel free to come back and gloat if you manage to convince them.

[li3wei1]

I'm confused. Are these flashcards (hence all the discussion about what people want to learn) or are they some sort of game (like Top Trumps in the UK, or those things teenagers play, I forget the name, that have sort of evolved from Dungeons and Dragons), or are they tradeable cards, like baseball cards?

[edelweis]

That's unclear at the moment.

 

Edit: I mean the OP is not sure yet.

 

But if I had such cards available, of a nice size, with Traditional stroke order AND pinyin, I might use them as flashcards, and/or bring one card to work everyday and study it when time allows, etc...

[Shelley]

Aside from the lack of pinyin, which has been discussed at length, (I would want it) how are you going to make a game/trading game out of this?

 

You will have to have some way to encourage collecting cards, and some way of distributing the cards in a random way. So you need to make it so you buy a pack,  small packs 5- 10 cards with something (sweets, or other types of low cost things) along the lines of baseball cards, it could work with just packs of cards with nothing else too, thinking about it.

 

Then you will have generated a swap and collect situation, collecting a whole set (of characters with same radicals or similar) will increase your "power" There will need to be some reward for collecting sets, maybe this could be linked to an online game that allows you to hear the character spoken (which is the one thing missing with actual card cards). You could play against people a game like snap, or trumps so having higher value cards (yet to be decided how to value them) would be worth seeking out and trading for.

 

All of the above is just my rambling ideas about how you might actually make a game from it.

 

Like the general idea, not going to worry about the content, thats up to you. If this works maybe you will do a pinyin, simplified, mandarin version.

[Lu]

I wonder who your intended audience is for including Middle Chinese pronunciation. If I were learning Cantonese or any other fangyan, I'd want flashcards (or whatever cards) with meaning and pronunciation in that fangyan, not in some other pronunciation that might be related to 'my' fangyan but not it. Learning Middle Chinese pronunciation would just be a detour that I would have zero interest in taking. You mention that you can predict Cantonese pronunciation with almost 100% accuracy, but if I were learning Cantonese, I would want a full 100% accuracy on my flashcards, not almost 100%.

 

If your audience is aspiring scholars of Middle Chinese, I wonder if there are enough of them to make this deck commercially feasible. Also, haven't the definitions of some (many) characters changed in the years since Middle Chinese? If I were an aspiring scholar of Middle Chinese, that would be something I would be worried about.

 

If your audience is people learning current-day Chinese - by far the largest possible audience - there is no need to include Middle Chinese pronunciation. Nobody speaks it anymore. From your earlier posts on these forums I know you have a great interest in Middle Chinese, and no doubt it's a highly interesting subject, but it's not that widely studied and I doubt there is a market for flashcards in this language.

 

And if you really want to include Middle Chinese pronunciation, is the way you're writing it now the most common way of doing so? If so, by all means proceed, but a possible problem I see is that anyone who can decipher the readings given on these cards already has pretty advanced Chinese and thus doesn't need these cards anymore.

 

A last point: the font you're using for the English definitions is not the best choice, I think. It's often seen in Chinese texts that include a little English, but there is a reason native speakers don't usually use it.

[ParkeNYU]

@li3wei1, that's what I'm here to figure out with all of you. :-)

 

@Edelweis, Glossika is based in Taiwan, and the ROC considers Zhuyin to be the primary means of phonetic representation, with Hanyu Pinyin being secondary. I'd imagine that has something to do with it, since Zhuyin has been the official national alphabet of the ROC for a over century, whilst Hanyu Pinyin has only recently become the official Romanised form of it. I sympathise with your desire to pair the newly-adopted Hanyu Pinyin with traditional characters as the main feature, but unfortunately, this particular combination is much rarer than Pinyin+Simplified and Zhuyin+Traditional; I can only think of some Hong Kong textbooks that pair Hanyu Pinyin with traditional characters, but they use a different standard of characters there (not significantly different, of course). As I had conceded earlier, it is indeed a good idea to include traditional characters on cards that primarily feature simplified characters, but including stroke order for the traditional characters implies that the user actually intends to write them; this is the rare combination to which I was referring.

 

@Shelley, those are all good ideas, and I will indeed give it more thought, now that I have more options to consider thanks to you. Also, I am now more seriously considering a mainland version to capture a wider audience.

 

@Lu, the Middle Chinese readings are not necessarily provided for the sake of learning Middle Chinese itself (although esoteric scholars like me can do that too); rather, it is a diaphonemic system in the same vein as Yuen Ren Chao's 'General Chinese'. In other words, it primarily serves as an orthography for converting ancient readings into those of organic, living languages. It is intended for advanced Mandarin learners who want to go back to their old cards and prepare themselves to become acquainted with other Chinese topolects, dialects, and Sino-Xenic languages. The format itself is my own 'reduction' of values that already exist in any serious Chinese character dictionary (including ones found online, like ZDIC). In fact, my electronic Japanese dictionary includes even older values for the sake of poetry. Users who aren't interested will view them as decorative gibberish and move on. It actually provides a nice 'host' onto which the vertical Zhuyin can latch (vertical Zhuyin looks awkward standing alone). As for the font, I know it is not good; the image is only a mock-up on MS-Paint to convey the basic layout. I naturally intend for the final product to look much better.

[edelweis]

Well, I don't know what to say. Even the TOCFL writing test has pinyin. Even PAVC has pinyin. (no Middle Chinese though?)

 

Anyway, I'll just buy something else.

 

Good luck.

[Hofmann]

I want to provide both KangXi and 'regular' fonts to showcase the greatest possible differences

康熙 forms don't even come close to the greatest possible differences from the MOE standard.

[imron]

A few points.

 

Firstly, the Glossika Mandarin materials that I have (all purchased before their Mainland versions were released e.g. material aimed at people wanting to learn Taiwanese Mandarin) use Hanyu Pinyin and the IPA for the pronunciation.  They contain no Zhuyin.

 

Secondly, InDesign supports the creation of templates and then you can just provide a datasource (such as an Excel spreadsheet or CSV file) and it will substitute in the appropriate parts.  It requires zero programming skills and is pretty easy to set up (see the official docs).  I agree that MS Paint is just about the worst program you can use for this.

 

Thirdly, there are plenty of people who learn one set of characters first and then decide to learn the other.  It's not odd at all that people might learn Simplified first and then go on to learn Traditional.  In fact I am one of those people, and I have zero interest in learning Zhuyin.  Even though I know it wouldn't take much time, I have a bunch of other things better to do with my time than learn yet another pronunciation system that I have no real need for.

 

I have no real opinion on whether the cards should or should not contain pinyin (they're your cards you can do what you want), but I think the arguments you are currently putting up against pinyin don't hold up to much scrutiny.