Sean's blog

Added 五官 (face parts) – at wossis.com

Many thanks to Chew Hong Liang, who helped me to test the new ‘Copy cardset’ feature and provided the captions and audio clips for the flashcards. Quite a lot more people were involved in choosing the name for the cardset! 五官 – ‘wǔguān’ in Pinyin was suggested as the best title.

My Chinese is lousy, so when I directly translated ‘simple words for parts of the head’ into Chinese, everybody just lifted the corner of their lip, or one eyebrow! I see that 五官 is translated as “five sense organs” at one website. I’d be interested to know what anybody else thinks.

Wossis isn’t intended to be a replica of Wikipedia. It seems to me that there could be many, many different sets of flashcards for 五官, differing in picture design, in explanatory text, or pronunciation of the words. You can’t normally change another user’s flashcards (though I have just also added a permissions-granting system), to prevent vandalism of your (or your favourite) flashcards. To make it a bit easier to contribute your own version of existing cardsets, I’ve just added a ‘Copy’ facility that will copy anybody’s cardset as your own.

I imagine one day there’ll be a need for a facility to remove copies that don’t add anything to the originals, but are just attempts to pass off someone else’s work as the copier’s. I’m not sure at this point how that’ll work. Drop me a postcard with your suggestions!