Sunday, October 11, 2009

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.
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2 comments:

  1. Aa*October 17, 2009 at 1:19 AM

    Question: I've been researching learning tools for learning Mandarin (as my girlfriend is also from Taiwan). There are an amazing number of online courses, podcasts, etc. that are inexpensive or free -- although it can be hard to judge the educational quality. Just wondering if you had looked online. I've had quite a bit of success with both Serge Melnyk's podcast and the iChinese iPhone app (as well as some offline resources). Since you've been at this for a while, maybe you've seen or heard of them. I'm curious as to your opinion of what's available out there.

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  2. KevinOctober 17, 2009 at 10:52 AM

    Hi Aaron,

    Most of the things I've found online have been geared toward the learning of simplified characters (instead of traditional) as well as learning how to pronounce words with a Beijing type accent (a lot of "R" sounds).

    As you can tell from my post, I have not yet found a good way to learn (and stay interested during busy days).

    One very good grammar book I bought during on of my trips to Taiwan was "Practical Audio-Visual Chinese" (volumes 1, 2, and 3). It is professionally written and describes the grammar and sentence structure in detail. You can also buy separately the VCD's that go along with the dialog in the book (yeah, VCD, not DVD... too bad). The audio quality is not great, but it's good enough.

    I found it on Amazon, but the price is outrageous. I bought mine at a bookstore for NT$430 (about 14 USD). Maybe the next time your girlfriend goes back to Taiwan, she could pick it up for you. Not sure if it's available in US bookstores, but you could try.

    http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Audio-Visual-Chinese-Level-Textbook/dp/9570912375

    The main online resources I use are the following:

    http://zhongwen.com/
    - It's been around for a very long time. I like it because it has BoPoMoFo phonetic symbols. I know a little pinyin, but I'm an expert at BoPoMoFo. Also, being a programmer, I need to get characters so I can copy/paste into a document.

    http://us.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php
    - An awesome site that I use to translate between English and Chinese.

    Another technique I've tried is to listen to pop songs from Taiwan and download a song's lyrics. However, the only gotcha I found was that most songs have a lot of metaphors or implied meanings. So, it can make it difficult to translate into English.

    I also try to listed to Hit FM in Taiwan... just so I can keep hearing Mandarin throughout the day to get the correct pronunciation.

    http://hitoradio.im.tv/showtime/onair_2.php

    And, finally, you can try listening to ICRT. It's mostly in English with some Mandarin thrown in. Kind of an interesting mix.

    http://www.icrt.com.tw/

    Cheers,
    Kevin

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