Mandarin Vocabulator

Posted on May 30th, 2005 in C#, Chinese by Patrick

Intro
This is a simple C# program I wrote in 2004 to help me study Chinese.

How It Works

  • You tell the Vocabulator which characters you want to practice (by selecting Week Numbers and Core/Supplementary categories)
  • You scroll through the (optionally randomised) list.
  • You can choose to display Characters by themselves (without the Pinyin) to test your character recognition, or alternatively view only Pinyin to practice your writing skills. (In the future I might integrate the WinXP writing pad so that you can test your characters properly — including stroke order!).
  • You can also test yourself against the clock and view your self-defined list as a slideshow.
  • I’m also thinking of adding a nice interface for adding/categorising your own characters (at the moment they’re hardwired into the source code) so that you can use the Vocabulator to revise just the ‘hard’ characters etc..

Download
Save this file to your desktop

Installation
You need to have the standard Chinese Font “simsun.ttc” installed. If you’re using Windows XP, you do this by installing “Files for East Asian Languages” in “Regional and Language Options” (through the Control Panel). For other windows varients you may have to download and install the font manually. This program is written in C# so you also need to have the latest .NET framework installed (from Micro$oft Windows Update).

Character List
The following Excel Spreadsheet contains all the Chinese Characters currently included in the program: WordList.xls. These thousand-odd Chinese words make up the entire content of Melbourne Univeristy’s First Year (Introductory) Chinese Course. The list was created by Du Liping of the Melbourne Institute of Asian Languages and Societies. Thanks Du Laoshi!