Happy Halloween / Osaka Countdown...

Happy Halloween 2009... a rainy day here in Atlanta.

Countdown: 59 days until our trip to Osaka.

We're taking an extended trip to Osaka and Kyoto, Japan at the end of December and will be there for over two weeks.  Looking forward to some time off as I've been working almost every day for the last three weeks.  The only way to get away is to go international... with no laptop in hand.

Still working on the concept for my iPhone app...

Black text (not a fan of white text)

Adding a little more depth...

A little darker...

Getting closer...

On my MacBook Pro, I use a chat application named Adium.  I really liked one of their add-on styles called "Sticker", so I decided to try it for my iPhone prototype.

Copy/paste/alter from another language app...

I found a nice look-and-feel from another language app.  I found a picture of the host at TVB and copied my own text in.  Still need to play with the colors some.

Powder blue mockup...

A blue mockup...

Rough mockup of iPhone app...

See below for my first rough mockup.  This is one of several color palette's I'm considering.  It's a little "chocolate-ty".  I'm really looking a for a good set of blue colors.  I've been looking around at various sites where I could grab their colors.

Kevin's Chinese Language Coach / iPhone App

Goals for my app:

1. It's really just for me... meaning, I probably won't list it in the App Store.
2. What?  You're writing an app but you're not going to try to make money off of it?  Yeah... I REALLY want to learn Chinese.
3. Back to the goals.... the app should be entertaining enough so that I don't get bored.
4. Able to help me in 10-minute chunks... which I have throughout the day, but never take advantage of.
5. Focus primarily on conversational Mandarin... and none of that "Today the weather is really nice". BORING!  
6. How do I make it interesting?  Well, I have a plan... still in the design stage.  It is to use a single episode of 食尚玩家 (Super Taste), a famous (I think) TV show that I recorded on my computer.  We have DirecTV's JadeWorld and get the TVBS channel.  I recorded several episodes last year and started writing a transcript of one of them (the host and the people she mets on her food adventures around Taiwan and Asia).
7. I haven't narrowed down the specifics, but I'm going to use a mix or audio and video in the app.  The audio is not the best quality but it is perfect in that it is conversational and not spoken by a host that speaks perfect Mandarin.  Yeah, it will be challenging, but everytime I go to Taiwan, most of the people speak everyday-Mandarin.  Same goes for folks here in America.  How many people here speak perfect English?
8. The app will force me to learn sentence-size chunks and will learn sentence-structure along the way.  I actually have some great books that teach grammar.  So, I will attempt to identify the grammar in the transcript and then mix the study lessons in.
9. The other reason why you won't be seeing this app in the App Store is that it contains a lot of copyrighted material.  Finally, the app is going to be very tailored to me. :)
10. I haven't ran a program yet to see how many unique characters the transcript has, but I would guess by the end of the show (I'm only 10 to 15 minutes of a 60 minute show), the transcript would have at least 1,500 characters.

I will be posting screenshots along the way.

Back to Learning Chinese...again

Yeah, it's time for a new strategy for learning Chinese while working a more than full-time job (at least 50 hours a week on a good week), chores around the house, travelling, yada, yada, yada.

Looking back over the last 11 years or so, I have tried to become literate in written and spoken Chinese many times.  Here are the strategies I remember:

1. Learn how to listen and respond.  [Failed: too many homophones]
2. Memorize characters and their pronunciations (using my own romanization) [Failed: couldn't remember all of the minute differences between characters]
3. Learned how to write each character, learned its pronunciation using BoPoMoFo phonetic symbols, and learned the definition. [Limited Success:  I learned the characters and could recognize them on TV, the newspaper, etc.  However, I didn't know how to place the characters in context to actually communicate with anyone.]
4. In addition to #3 above, I also started learning the words that are made up of two or more characters combined.  [Better, but I still can't communicate in sentences]
5. Finally, I added sentence construction (grammar) to #4 above.  Result: better, but it's time-consuming.

Yeah, I'm whining.  If I really want to learn the language (and I really do), then I have to make time.

Being a developer, I'm tried using my skills to make flash card programs, etc. to help me learn Chinese.  I never really got far enough along with them before I said, "This is too time-consuming" and gave up.

Well... I'm about to try it once again... This time, I want to create an iPhone app. 

I looked around the App Store and saw a ton of language apps, but most were all about memorizing individual characters and none of them had any grammar lessons.  Also, some of the audio was definitely from someone from mainland China.  I've been speaking very broken Chinese for the last 11 years, and I can't change my accent (to add all the "R" sounds).

(continued in next blog entry)

Test upload from iPhone

Fuzzy, one of my cats.

Working the evening shift these days...

Ugh... feel like crap.  Leave for work at 2:00 pm and get home at 1:00am.  A few more weeks of this and I'll be back to a 9-to-5.  It's really hard to sleep past 8:00am.

Spent a few hours this morning reading other folks' blogs and added a few more links to my blog roll.  I especially enjoy reading blogs of Americans that have recently moved to Taiwan to teach English.

The best one I came across today was The Razzel Berry.