Sean's blog

Chinese character flash cards

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Emily (my 3 year-old daughter) has a few sets of Chinese character flash cards from her kindergarten. We were using them one night recently when I thought they’d make a good test page for Spinneret. I’ve been wondering about javascript (never used it before) and Ajax and what I would do as a first attempt. Well, here it is – Chinese character flash cards!

I don’t really speak Chinese – as a Chinese-speaker listening to my pronunciation might guess! My native language is Thames Estuary English. My brother-in-law introduced me to some of his builder friends recently at a wedding reception near Port Dickson. It was a bit awkward – he explained that they didn’t speak English. I learned the little Chinese I speak from some Chinese (Malaysians don’t sound the same when they speak Chinese) colleagues and in a class run by a man from Suzhou back in the UK. I did my best to say “I speak Chinese not good”, to which one of the builders replied using the same words with “also” added. He said it in the style of the Beijing Opera. I think he was taking the mickey out of my pronunciation. It made me laugh like a crazy man!

The flash card web page is not an earth-shattering application, but it does get me over the ‘start learning javascript hurdle’ and also gets Spinneret to the ‘accommodates javascript’ stage (though that isn’t saying very much either). I’d be interested to hear reports of working / not working for the javascript. There are a few bits that I think need a little bit more attention (no fall-back for non-javascript / non-flash browsers, for example).

The flash cards are picked at random, which can be annoying when you get the same one twice in a row – there aren’t many! A few seconds after a card is shown, the pinyin equivalent is faded up, and shortly after that, you should be able to hear me saying the word. Maybe one day I’ll add a ‘contribution’ facility so that someone who can actually speak Chinese provides the sounds!

Update 6th January – I’m working on a flashcard website that allows people to contribute their own, and even edit each other’s cards (with permission!). It’s a work-in-progress as of January 2010, but I’d love to know what you think of it:

Wossis.com

This set of cards has been copied to the new site as:

Poditronic Han Zi

There’s another set of Chinese flaschards for the numbers one to ten here:

Mandarin Chinese one to ten