The Problem in Learning Chinese . . .
Most would agree that learning to read well in any language requires spending a significant amount of time actually reading. This is as true with Chinese as with any language, but for those learning Chinese as a second language,
reading Chinese is particularly troublesome. Looking up a Chinese character in a dictionary is far more complicated than looking up a word in English, or in any western language (with an alphabet). The ordering of letters in an alphabet
facilitates the lookup of words. With Chinese, however, there is no easy ordering. (There is an ordering, but it’s definitely not easy.) The problem is compounded by the number of characters one has to deal with in Chinese.
Whereas in English there’s a mere twenty-six basic units (letters) with which words are formed, in Chinese there are many thousands of basic units (characters). Most characters are words in themselves, but they are also the
basis for forming other words.
and the Chinese Toolbox Solution
Chinese Toolbox READER attempts to address this problem by providing (1) a Chinese reader, (2) an integrated, customizable character dictionary, (3) a community supported word dictionary, (4) a unique system of character review, (5) and several other tools for learning Chinese. In the reader you can paste any Chinese text, then as you move the cursor (a box surrounding the current character) through the text, characters you haven’t yet learned appear in the dictionaries. Eventually, after encountering a character frequently enough, and pondering on it at least momentarily, you will recognize the character without dictionary assistance. At that point, you can press the spacebar to mark the character for non-assisted reading. Thereafter, the character appears in the reading window in gray. Characters you have not yet learned to recognize appear in blue. Gray (or known) characters are not displayed in the dictionary window when they are selected (via keyboard direction keys) in the reading window. As you mark more and more characters for non-assisted reading, you begin to reduce your dependence on the dictionaries and truly begin to read in Chinese. The program keeps track of the number of characters you’ve marked as known. The gradual increase in this number is most encouraging.
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