My Chinese Flash Cards program for free

[rockytriton]

Hey everyone, while learning chinese, I decided to write my own little application for doing flash cards, it's turned out to be very helpful! I decided to give it away to other who may want to try it as well. It's not intended to be for real chinese lessons, but it works pretty well, and it allows you to put in your own flash cards and set your own levels. If you want to download it, you can get it from my site:

http://www.dreamsyssoft.com/flashcards.jsp

You will need the .NET framework to run it, but you may already have it without even knowing it. Hope this helps you as well as it helps me!

Also, you will need to extract all the files to a single folder and then run the program, because the chinese words and sentences are separate files so that you can edit them.

-- Rocky

[trevelyan]

Let me be the first to say... nice program. Not sure if you're looking for this level of feedback but since I think this has the potentially to be a really great learning tool, I took the time to write up some thoughts and suggestions:

SUGGESTIONS:

(1) The program seems a bit picky matching against pinyin. It would be great if it could seamlessly handled the spacing issues that crop up with pinyin comparisons (ie. removing all spaces and numbers from pinyin strings before comparing...).

(2) A simpler interface would also be nice.... its a bit distracting to have so many controls and all that English on screen. Why not have an "options" submenu and put things there? One problem with having everything on the front page is that I can't shrink the program to a small portion of the desktop.

(3) Is there another way of displaying text than the textbox?. Textboxes draw the eye because they're white, and give people the expectation that they can (and should) edit them. The large number of user-editable spaces keeps it from being really obvious what the proper thing to do is on first glance....

(4) Somewhat petty, but how about hotkeys for the critical "next" and "show answer" buttons? Its a hassle to keep switching between the mouse and keyboard on a laptop, and switching between input methods breaks up the rhythm of testing and hurts my concentration.

(5) Really nitpicking ---- isn't 操 cao3 not chan3?

BUGS:

The software coughs up errors if (1) I use my own wordlist but request testing from a level it doesn't contain, (2) the software can't access the Internet for help, and (3) the wordlist isn't provided in UTF-8.

WORDLISTS:

In the hopes of pushing things along and in order to play around with the software, I whipped up two extra wordlists people should feel free to use if interested. The content is basically a straight drop from the Adso database, so anyone is free to redistribute it under the terms of the Adso and LDC licenses. I hope if anyone wishes to make any additions, they'd consider doing it through us. We can always output fresh copies.

http://www.adsotrans.com/countries.utf <--- Countries

http://www.adsotrans.com/slang.utf <--- Slang

A really clean and intuitive flashcard system like this would also be great to integrate with something like NewsinChinese or Adsotrans.... I'd love to have Adso automatically create personalized flashcard sets for the content I add, or automatically generate flashcards for the low-frequency words in texts I need to read.

There's a lot of potential here. Good work!

.

[rockytriton]

Thanks for the feedback, I may take your suggestions and make an actual product out of this (it would still be free of course). It was pretty much designed for my learning style so I already knew how everything works in it, it wasn't really intended for general use but I figured people might be able to make use of it. Also thanks for posting the extra word lists. On your comment about the file not being UTF-8, well, it can't be and still contain unicode characters, which I think makes it easier for people with non-chinese versions of windows.

Eventually when I make some updates to it, I think that I will also put a section for people to share word lists and sentence lists. If you notice, there is also a sentence interface for sentence flash cards and editing the sentence lists, but it's pretty buggy so far so I didn't bother to tell people about it.