China/Chinese related software/travel guides/maps for Palm

[John]

I have a Tungsten T3 and so far, I've bought and installed the following China/Chinese related software:

- Oxford Concise E&C Dictionary - of course!

- CJKOS (http://www.dyts.com) - Chinese OS - only used for displaying and entering Chinese characters rather than for Chinese menus.

- SuperMemo (http://www.mapletop.com) - it's supposed to be a more intelligent flashcard program but I haven't started trying to use it yet.

- Mobipocket Reader (http://www.mobipocket.com - free) - for reading a (paid for) subscription to the South China Morning Post, http://www.scmp.com (which has articles on China).

- AvantGo (http://www.avantgo - free) - for reading the free xianzai.com channel.

I was wondering whether anybody has any other recommendations ?

I've been trying to find good travel guides to China but found nothing (other than http://www.redbang.com on Beijing but that's a few years old now and only low resolution/B&W; Lonely Planet CitySync Hong Kong and Rough Guide to Hong Kong).

Does anybody have any recommendations for a map of China showing reasonably big cities and the boundaries of the various provinces ?

 

[beirne]

Supermemo

You have all of the Chinese software that I have, so I have no new recommendations. I will make a few comments about Supermemo, though. It is the killer Palm app for me. I have been using it for several years and it has helped my vocabulary a lot. The nice part about Supermemo is that you see words you know well less often than words you don't know well. This means that I won't be quizzed on lai2 until 2005, but I got ruo4 today. This greatly increases the number of flashcards you can handle. I have 6854 entries in my regular vocabulary rotation. This is not the number of words that I know, because there are separate entries for Engligh-Chinese, Chinese-English, and characters->English, although not necessarily all three. By allowing Supermemo to manage how often I see the words, I only get quizzed on 70-100 words from this st each day and I don't waste time seeing common words at the same rate as the less common ones.

The only bad part about Supermemo in relation to Chinese is that it doesn't display the characters very well, in spite of what they say on the web page. They built in their own font sizing system, so that every letter and character is resized before display. This works OK for the roman alphabet, but often the Chinese characters get garbled when being tested. I end up having to reveal the original entries for the flashcard and cover up the answer with my hand so that I can see the small but clear form of the character. Also, it does not display the nice large-size characters like the OECD.

 

[mikelove]

I agree with beirne's assessment, I'm not aware of too many other major Chinese-related products for Palm.

We are, however, trying to one-up Supermemo a bit in the new version of our flashcard system; it should boast a comparable level of customizability and automation along with some sort of a desktop import ability (perhaps not quite as advanced in the first version), and we've even got some new ideas of our own for how to efficiently select study words.

 

[Jianchuanbrit]

I'd like to add a couple of little apps that I find handy to have at my fingertips on those rare occasions when I need them.
One is ChiNums which is simply a chart showing the complex number forms for numbers 1-10, and 100, 1000, and 10,000. Useful for when you need to write them on a bank form or whatever.
The other is Qianwan which is a table showing how Chinese numbers compare to their English equival;ents. You know how hard it is to remember how to say 60 million in Chinese? (liu qianwan).
These are both available at freewarepalm.com. Unfortunately that site seems to be blocked from within China. Anyone else have trouble accessing it?

 

[goulniky]

Shumu : alternative to ChiNum/Qianwan

thanks for pointing those out, tried them and came up with my own alternative, combining the two with a little more functionality.
this is an overnight job testing the Orbforms environment (thus the size, 79Kb). But assuming you have CJKOS installed you'll be able to see numbers in either hanyu pinyin, regular or daxie (checks) format, simplified or traditional depending on your CJKOS setup. it has a calculator-type keypad to enter digits. this has not been submitted to any palm shop yet but if it ever does it'll remain freeware.
I also have CJKOS and the Pleco dictionary installed. For text I prefer iSilo which in its latest version has UTF-8 support. I bought the upgrade but haven't had time to test it on Chinese files yet.

http://www.goulnik.com/palm/Shumu.zip

 

[John]

I'm looking for an "intelligent" flash card program - Supermemo has the problem which Beirne mentioned above and PlceoDict (which sounds as if it'll do everything ) isn't out yet.

I've currently looking at MeisterMerker - user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~jonash / http://www.metaviewsoft.de - which appears to adjust the frequency of cards based on past correct/wrong answers, doesn't have the display problem of Supermemo, can import cards from memo records, etc.

Anyone else have any comments and/or recommendations ?

John

 

[MichaelK]

Right now I'm in SuperMemo.

I know it's indicipherable in standard use for complex Chinese.

(that's why I go to the database to take a peak at the regular font Chinese when I can't make heads or tails)

But I have learned (probably relearned 200 characters) in the past 3 weeks with this. Is this other program comparable aside from the fonts in your opinion.

I'm just waiting for for the new Pleco, but have reservations because of the lack of Supermemo style algorithms to optimize your retention.

Suggestion: how about a feature to put in your own algorithms of the frequency of flashcards to appear, Mike?

 

[mikelove]

Actually our own frequency adjusting system should work pretty well, though probably not on the level of SuperMemo. I haven't heard of anything else on Palm that does what SuperMemo does, Anki (http://www.anki.com/) is another flashcard program that supports large Chinese characters, but as far as I know they don't offer any kind of a frequency adjustment feature, and their software seems to me to be kind of overpriced compared to SuperMemo.

I don't think there's any easy way for us to give people the ability to put in their own algorithms (we'd have to do it as a shared library or something, and it would be an absolute nightmare to support), but our own system should be highly customizable; in our current design you can define as many "ranks" as you want, tweak the frequency with which cards in each rank appear, and use a variety of criteria to automatically assign cards to and promote/demote cards between ranks.

Then again, adding SuperMemo-style algorithms to our own system is starting to seem like it might be a worthwhile idea... maybe not in PlecoDict 1.0, since we really don't want to start adding more features to that at this point, but in the long run it would give us a big advantage over any future competition to have such a system in place. Especially if we combined it with an audio pronunciation feature of some sort; we'd almost have our very own built-in Pimsleur course.

 

[mikelove]

Having done a little more research, I'm not sure if SuperMemo's specific approach really does make a whole lot of sense for PlecoDict (or is worth licensing or attempting to emulate).

The main appeal of SuperMemo as far as I can tell is that it attempts to minimize the number of times you need to practice something in order to memorize it - it tries to space out your repetitions of a particular item by the greatest number of days so that you'll still remember it each time it comes up. This, in theory, should maximize the number of items you can learn in a given amount of time, because you'll be spending the minimum amount of time you need to on any given item. They use some very fancy algorithms to accomplish this learning optimization, and it appears that it really does work well in a lot of cases.

However, I'm not convinced that this approach is useful for foreign language study, because langage learning rarely ever happens in a vacuum. Most people studying a foreign language are also using that language in other contexts, in a class or textbook or simply in daily life in a foreign country. Hence, there will often be instances when you're exposed to a vocabulary word without the flashcard system knowing about it. And without knowing how often you're actually seeing a word I don't see how even a very sophisticated algorithm could really optimize the repetition spacing, at least certainly not to the levels of precision that the more recent versions of the SuperMemo algorithm boast of.

So I think the "rank"-based approach I mentioned in my previous message (also known as the Leitner Box System, though our implementation is somewhat more sophisticated than Leitner's original) should work at least as well for most people as SuperMemo does. And it actually has some significant advantages too, since for example it allows you to take advantage of the task-based learning approach that's been discussed elsewhere in these forums.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on the subject and the reason why it's unlikely we'll be adding SuperMemo-like algorithms to PlecoDict anytime soon. Though anyone with a better background in this stuff than myself is of course more than welcome to weigh in with a contradictory opinion...

 

[MichaelK]

I am not qualified to give a linguistic/statistical/psychological-behaviorial analysis of the benefits and shorts of SuperMemo.

but I can give opinion based on use.

and I hope opinion can help design something better.

Pro's of SuperMemo: it works to a degree. (there aren't that many other options for other software right now ... excellent niche market).

Con's: It was not developed for Chinese Learning


I can remember the pinyin spellings, and definitions of words fairly well.
(I think that if I could remember a fairly useless four character idiom, the Hanzi writing and the meaning(s), I did fairly well)
What makes me mark that D button (fail) is tone on one character.

If you can incorporate a value system that adjusts separately for incorrect tone answers for a multi-syllabic entry (in your one-upped SuperMemo which I believe you will have)

where the pinyin recall, hanzi and definition recall are correct ...

We can plow forward, learn more Vocab etc. ... and deal with the tone issue later when ...

"When we throw that perfect spiral"* instead of doing the useless entry over and over.

*(football reference, no amount of explanation can help a kid throw that damn nerf unwobbly ... it just happens). (hope it happens soon for me in China).(grin).

Just throwing out another thought/disgruntlement.

Don't know if it's that useful, but repeating entries because I don't know if it's 2nd or 3rd tone is frustrating when people understand me just fine when speaking. (ie simple example ... nin2 ... I used to often make the mistake of marking it 3rd because ni3).

really looking forward to your new flashcard system

MichaelK

 

[mikelove]

Well I suppose it wouldn't be too difficult to allow multiple levels of answer... SuperMemo kind of does this, but in a graduated way. I'm not 100% sure how we'd work it in though... perhaps by providing multiple flashcard answers which could weight the average score differently, so for example instead of simply calculating your accuracy as (correct answers) / (total answers) it would calculate it as (correct answers + (correct-except-for-tones answers / 2)) / total answers. Or perhaps we can simply calculate them as correct but add some sort of special flag to them to remind you to review tones on them later. Hmm... definitely worth looking into anyway. Many thanks for your thoughts on this.

 

[padjo59]

this might be a silly question, but...

How do you load the flashcards into a flashcard programme such as Supermemo? I've looked at their download page and it doesn't seem to have any Chinese language databases that you can download.

Did I miss something, or do you download the flashcards from somewhere else?

thanks in advance

Padjo

 

[mei2qiang2]

Re: Shumu : alternative to ChiNum/Qianwan

FYI, this link has changed to
http://www.goulnik.com/palm/yShumu.zip

other stuff at
http://www.goulnik.com/palm

thanks for pointing those out, tried them and came up with my own alternative, combining the two with a little more functionality.
this is an overnight job testing the Orbforms environment (thus the size, 79Kb). But assuming you have CJKOS installed you'll be able to see numbers in either hanyu pinyin, regular or daxie (checks) format, simplified or traditional depending on your CJKOS setup. it has a calculator-type keypad to enter digits. this has not been submitted to any palm shop yet but if it ever does it'll remain freeware.
I also have CJKOS and the Pleco dictionary installed. For text I prefer iSilo which in its latest version has UTF-8 support. I bought the upgrade but haven't had time to test it on Chinese files yet.

http://www.goulnik.com/palm/Shumu.zip