Study Tool
nitrox
April 30, 2008, 04:03 PM posted in General DiscussionI made a small web-application to learn chinese characters and count, how many I already know. I thought maybe somebody else may use it too.
Just paste some chinese text in the left box and press the button. All individual characters will then be displayed and translated. As most of the characters alone do not make a lot of sense also the corresponding multicharacter words in the text will be translated. Clicking the buttons next to the characters will put them into the exclude list and subsequently supresses (and counts) them. I use this functionality to count how many characters I already know.
The program will remember your exclusion list, so the next time you open the site you can continue where you left off.
http://content.edive.ch
Let me know if you have some suggestions for further functionality or spot bugs.
bazza
May 04, 2008, 07:00 PMI've excluded 442 characters now. :)
azerdocmom
April 30, 2008, 04:56 PMThat's pretty neat. I think others who are seriously learning/studying Chinese should try it; I did it once just for fun and it's cool. Thanks for sharing.
cassielin
April 30, 2008, 05:18 PMhi nitrox, It is very cool , thank you for sharing this!^_^
bazza
April 30, 2008, 06:06 PMThis is excellent for working out how many characters you already know. I tried it on a chaper of the bible and I've so far excluded 107 characters that I know. :)
kait
April 30, 2008, 06:11 PM谢谢！ very neat program!
phettu
April 30, 2008, 06:18 PMMay i also say without sounding like i have shares in the company (which i do not) i use NJStar for translating Hanzi and word processing, and it uses pop ups to explain the hanzi and pinyin. it does however cost money to use, I just find programs like this utterly invaluable :)
RJ
April 30, 2008, 07:34 PMThanks for sharing that Nitrox. I will definitely use it.
bazza
April 30, 2008, 07:49 PMThis is great for lesson analysis as well.
nitrox
April 30, 2008, 08:11 PMBazza, you seem to have clicked a lot of buttons already :-) My score is 103 so far, which means a few more years of studying ahead of me. By the way: The program uses the free CEDICT dictionary file for the word matching.
phettu
April 30, 2008, 04:26 PMhi Nitrox nice litte program for copying and pasting into, :) very simple and handy nice job Phill :)
calkins
April 30, 2008, 08:59 PMImpressive application! Thanks for sharing nitrox. Would it be too hard to make it work with traditional hanzi?
bazza
April 30, 2008, 09:08 PMI've excluded 212 characters now. :)
frances
April 30, 2008, 09:49 PMIt's very fun. What dictionary are you using? The context column is interesting, though it did not correctly identify all of the multi-character words in my sample text. It did pretty well.
frances
April 30, 2008, 09:50 PMOops. I see you already said that it's CEDICT.
nitrox
April 30, 2008, 10:24 PMcalkins, i will probably make a new release supporting traditional hanzi at some point. I just didn't do that so far because I don't plan to learn traditional. But it shouldn't be to hard to add. frances, i expect the program to not correctly identify all multi-character words. Mainly because the program does not do any semantic analysis of the text, but also because CEDICT does not contain as many entries as some other dictionaries.
wei1xiao4
May 01, 2008, 01:59 AMNitrox, you are so clever. This is really so helpful. It is now in my bookmarks as I plan to use it often. Now can you figure out one that can measure how many characters you can actually write from memory. I find that reading and writing memory are completely two different entities. Does anyone else have that problem? If I can read the character, why is it so hard to remember how to write it?
calkins
May 01, 2008, 02:14 AMNitrox, thanks so much! Sometimes it's hard being the traditional outcast that no one wants to play with :) No rush of course.
calkins
May 01, 2008, 02:15 AMWeixiao, I agree completely. To me, characters look completely different (obviously) on the computer screen than handwritten on paper. As if learning hanzi isn't difficult enough.
nitrox
April 30, 2008, 08:16 PMah, and thanks you guys for the feedback !!!
bazza
April 30, 2008, 04:23 PMWow, that's very cool.