Program for making Chinese Flash Cards

[hdejarne]

Hey does anyone know of a good program for making chinese flash cards? I thought it would be better for me to practice with computer type than my own handwriting.

[amandagmu]

Install East Asian Language fonts on whatever computer you use. (To install on a PC you have to go into the control panel / language settings and manually install and restart the computer, on a Mac in System Prefs go to Personal > International). Once you've done this you can switch between English and Chinese (on a PC/WinXP this shows up in the bottom right corner near your icons where you can switch between the two languages, on a Mac you switch in the upper right hand corner). Open up word and type pinyin. The characters show up, and you can pick the correct ones from a list to tab through (since tones aren't an option). That's the way I've done all sorts of flashcards since Chinese 101.

~Amanda

[hdejarne]

Hey thanks for the reply. Actually I was tooling around with Microsoft Office last night and discovered that I already had the Chinese simplified and Traditional fonts installed on my computer. Has anyone used Supermemo and Vtrain? I was looking at the two programs the other night and they seem to do the same thing, and Vtrain is a little cheaper, which one is better?

[bogleg]

Check out this recent thread.

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/8195-best-of-chinese-study-tools-studying-chinese-online-and-off

There's a bunch of good links there.

Chris

[roddy]

I'm a little confused (not unusual). Are you looking for hints on how to use your PC to make flashcards which you will print out and use, or for flashcard software?

[hdejarne]

Well... both actually. Right now I'm trying to make some flash cards on my computer since I'm just beginning with the characters (though I think I've figured that out now). But I'm prettty sure I'll need to move to a computer format eventually. (I can't keep up with 2000 flash cards!)

[Kiwi Brazuca]

VTrain is the best flashcard program I have seen, but it suffers from the defect of all flashcard programs: the flashcards only have two sides. In my study of Chinese, I need to learn the relationships between four interconnected items:

• The Hanzi character
  
• The English meaning
  
• The pronunciation
  
• The genealogy or etymology of the charcter, a la Zhongwen.com
  

Given one of these items, I need to be able to recall any of the others. So far I have seen no program that will allow me to do this.

For a while I was making up my own four-sided flashcards, but it consumed too much time.

Has anyone found a solution to this?

[hdejarne]

How would you make a 4 sided Flash Card?

[gato]

With PlecoDict, all you have to do is enter the characters and the words you want to learn, it'll create the flashcards for you (with the characters, pinyin, and definitions).

http://www.pleco.com/products.html