I just discovered this iPhone App called Chinese Flashcards that helps you practice reading Chinese Characters on the go. I've been using it while on the subway, elevator, waiting room, and being the true nerd I am, while walking down the street. I recommend it for beginners that want to get familiar with basic Chinese characters as well as advanced speakers who want to brush up on their vocab. Reading and writing Chinese characters is a hard skill to keep up. If you don't live in China or Taiwan it's easy to quickly forget the meaning of common characters and how to write them. Even some of the Chinese-Americans I know, whose families speak only Chinese at home, can't read and write a lot of basic vocabulary words because they are out of practice.
Chinese Flashcards is pretty straight forward. The screen displays a Chinese character and after you've decided the meaning and pronunciation (or not), you click Show Answer. The next screen shows the definition/pronunciation and asks you "Did you answer correctly?: No, Yes, Skip." The characters start out easy and get progressively more difficult with a total of 2700 characters in the program. I've heard that you need to know about 3,500 characters to read a Chinese newspaper so if you can memorize all these, you're well on your way. You can display the characters in Simplified form (what Mainland China uses) or Traditional form (what Hong Kong and Taiwan uses).
The iPhone App is $4.99 and you can download it
HERE. If you don't have an iPhone the company also has a web-based flash card system on the their website:
www.chineselearnonline.com
Okay, I'm off to practice.
chinese language
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