Vocabulary flashcards in traditional Hanzi ??

ladave

July 05, 2008, 05:07 AM posted in General Discussion

Is there a way to get the flashcards application to display the traditional character set instead of simplified ??

A better traditional character support? Don't expect too much from ChinesePod - they are located in Shanghai, PRC, and they seem to be obliged to use only simplified characters as they are very tightly connected to a state-run language institute: http://www.confuciusinstitute.net

Anyway, their traditional texts are full of mistakes - they seem to be machine-translated..., and because many of their employees never learned them.

tvan

July 05, 2008, 07:00 PM

I think the short answer is "No". That said, hanyuxuesheng is being a bit hard on CPod with the "full of mistakes" comment. I notice ocassional problems, but the PDF's are, by and large, accurate.

That said, the point about this site using simplified characters is largely correct, whatever the reasons.

RJ

July 05, 2008, 07:38 PM

yellowbridge has wonderful sets of on line flashcards and you have a choice of traditional or simplified.

http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/flashcards.php

ladave

July 05, 2008, 07:47 PM

Thanks tvan and rjberki.

hanyuxuesheng

July 05, 2008, 08:06 PM

Maybe I am a bit harsh on CP.

Yes, the podcasts are excellent. But the rest...

Using CP nearly 2 years with a free account, and occasionally checking whether traditional support has been improved, I am still disappointed (plugin needed to read trad text, small font size, mistakes, ...).

After all the CP relaunches the traditional support is very poor. This is not "Learning Chinese on my terms".

E.g. 什么 shénme is written in CP trad. transcripts "甚麼", which is old-fashioned. The modern way of writing this in Taiwan is "什麼".

"干" and "面" is very often wrongly transcribed in trad. texts, because of their ambiguity.

lostinasia

July 06, 2008, 03:46 AM

The plugin doesn't work in Firefox 3 anyway, does it? It seems like traditional support has been abandoned. We're certainly getting no replies from ChinesePod on a thread that's asked repeatedly about this.

Please let me know if I'm wrong on this, since my subscription expired and it's not worth my while to subscribe if even the stop-gap plugin doesn't work anymore. Too bad - I've enjoyed using ChinesePod, but I get the impression they're writing off Taiwan-based students.

calkins

July 06, 2008, 04:20 AM

I've yet to upgrade to Firefox 3 for the sole reason that the plugin won't work. I'd really like to upgrade before version 4 is released.

And I agree with LostInAsia. My subscription expires in a few weeks, and without traditional support, I can't say it's completely worth the subscription fee....hate to blackmail, but at the very least, a response from CPod would go a long way.

calkins

July 06, 2008, 04:23 AM

And personally, I think resorting to a plugin is counter-intuitive.

It'd be nice if there were separate lesson pages for traditional and simplified, with the user specifying character choice in his/her account settings.

The pdf's are in both, why not all pages?

penben

August 01, 2008, 11:42 AM

I've created a chinesepod based Flashcard program which might be of help. You can export your vocab list to XML and import it into the program. Granted, Cpod does not include traditional in the xml, but they leave the space for it. You'd then have to use the editor in the program to fill in the Traditional. I talk more about the software here if you're interested.