Chinese-Course.com Blog ~

We’ve finally reached the 10.000 words milestone. Of those 10.000 words added we’ve recorded 9529. So now you should be able to find almost any Chinese word you are looking for and making it one of the most comprehensive Chinese Audio Flashcard Site out there. And no worries we will keep adding new words. You can also send us some word lists if you want.

We’ve also added a couple of new word lists like “Towns in Taiwan”, “Metals”, “Vegetables”, “Kinship”, “Countries”, “Animals”, etc.. more to come soon. To see them click on “Public Word Lists” in the navigation. You are also welcome to suggest more lists.

A new user suggested feature is that you can now browse words by frequency. Just click on “Add new Words” in the navigation bar and then on “By frequency”. You’ll seen see a breakdown of the word frequencies from 1 to 10. 10 being the most frequent words. Most words have the frequency 5 (2638 words), the rarest being frequency 10 with only 66 words.

Since Chinese-Course.com is a Taiwan specialised language site I’m always interested in Taiwanese News. Today I’ve read an article about Taiwan formally recognizing Kosovo’s independence. I wasn’t surprise by this since Taiwan itself has similar ambitions. Many European countries seem to be supporting Kovoso’s independence, as opposed to Taiwan’s independence. My impression is that China will never allowed Taiwan to become independent, and few countries will go against China and its powerful economy. On the other hand I hardly know any Taiwanese who are supporting the idea to re-unite with China. I guess if China wouldn’t be so eager and put pressure on Taiwan to unite public opinion would be different. As an outsider I’m not sure whats the best policy. I think in the long run it doesn’t really matter if Taiwan becomes part of China or not. The important thing is that things don’t turn ugly and result in a violent conflict. The world is getting more and more global, so on some level we are all become part of a “global village” anyway - if we like it or not.

We’ve change our blog software from Nucleus CMS to Wordpress. The reason being that Nucleus doesn’t seem to use UTF8 which means it can’t cope with Chinese characters very well. For you it means that you have to update your RSS Feed if you are subscribed.

The new RSS feed is:

http://www.chinese-course.com/blog/xml-rss2.php

We’ve noticed that some people try to search not only in English or Chinese but also in Pinyin. So from now on you can also find words through pinyin, with or without tones. For instance you can search for “xue2 zhong1 wen2″ or “xue zhong wen”, both will come up with learn Chinese.

As for the number of added words we’ve almost reached a new milestone of 8000 words, with almost all of them recorded.

This might come as a surprise to you but this is actually a difficult question. I’ve checked several dictionaries and they all seem to have their own translations.

簽餅 (Dr. Eye / Yahoo Dict)
簽語餅 (MDBG.net / Cedict)
幸運小餅 (Handedict)
籤語餅 (Translation found on a cookie wrapper)

Some dictionaries don’t list anything for fortune cookie like the Oxford’s Pocket Chinese Dictionary I own. The most common translation seems to be the literal translation of fortune + cookie which is 幸運餅. 幸運 means fortune and 餅 means cookie or cake.

You may wonder why there are so many translations. The reason for this is actually quite simple yet surprising. Most Western people probably don’t know this and think the fortune cookie was invented in China but it wasn’t. According to Wikipedia the origin of this unusual cookie can be found in California or Japan. Its a fairly new invention but unfortunately it can’t be definitely said who came up with the idea.

Anyway, we’ve added two translation (幸運餅 and 籤語餅) for fortune cookie to our electronic flashcard website, if anybody knows a better one let us know.

I’ve changed the way “Practice Sentences” works. Now you don’t have to click on “Explain Sentence” to see the mouseover explanation and the other functions like adding sentence words. This will hopefully save some time and make our Flashcard application even more convenient when practising the sentences. As usual I’ve only put up the beta version, please test it and let me know if there are problems.

Like already announced in the previous blog post we now offer more flexibility for the lists. You can now browse a public list and only add specific words to your lists (including the master list).

Also there is now a “Details” link for the words available (e.g. when adding new words or browsing lists). So its possible to listen to the words and see the stroke order outside the “practice mode”.

I’ve added two more Multiple Choice tests. One shows you a Chinese word and you need to pick the right translation out of six English options. Another really cool one is that you can listen to a word and then need to pick the English translation. This MultiChoice feature will train your conversational skills pretty efficiently I think. It requires the user to upgrade to a premium account, since sound will only work for full members.

Another possible improvement might be on the way for the lists. Holly a user suggested this:

By the way, on the Chinese site, is there a way to move words between lists without having to add them to lists individually? When I grab a list from the public listings, sometimes there are only a few words I don’t know. The public lists are a great resource, but it would be nice to extract new words from them to add to my master list - then I can review them mixed in with unrelated words instead of having to review them by category only.

I’ve been planning to implement the Multiple Choice feature for quite some time now. Many e-learning sites offer this feature and some of the Chinese-Course user have requested this feature, it will also help the site to offer more varied vocabulary activities. This new language exercise will help many people practice their Chinese in a different way. I’ve tested it and it is really a fun way to drill your “Zhongwen”. There are still a lot things to do, the simplified characters aren’t working yet, but will come soon. Also I think it’s a good idea if you can listen to the Chinese words and phrases after the user has made the multiple choice selection. Probably I will also offer all kinds of variations. At the moment it shows an English word or phrase and then you have to choose the Chinese word out of 6 options. The next step would be offering an Chinese word and then the Chinese learner has to choose the English word. It might be also worth to offer multiple choice exercises for sentences. Anyway just wanted to announce the new feature on the blog and I hope this will help you improve your Chinese real fast. Looking forward to your feedback.

I’m still looking for people who want to write about living in Taiwan. I’ve already send a newsletter to all members but in the end a lot of people promised a lot but didn’t deliver. So if you have been living in Taiwan (or China) drop me a line. Writing two or three pages is already enough, no need to write hundreds of pages. Topics could include getting a job in Taiwan, customs, dangers, etc. As an incentive I’ll offer free premium memberships (1 year, or 2 year if it’s a very good article) and/or a link in the eBook to your blog. Contact me if you are interested.