Tutorial 2: Reviewing Characters by Levels
The following tutorial was written for Chinese Toolbox FREE 7.1.0, but the principles apply to the current version as well. The differences between 7.1 and 9.1 are minor. First, the CHARACTER UNDERSTANDING panel in 7.1 has been moved to the Character Understanding and Review window. Second, the field labels have been shorten. Third, the Understanding group and the Review group are positioned horizontally instead of vertically in relation to the other.
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After using Chinese Toolbox FREE for a few days, you’ll probably want to begin reviewing the characters that you previously marked for unassisted reading. Launch the program if it is not already open. For a new session, something similar to the following will appear:
Notice when you start a new session that characters in the Reader do not initially appear with gray backgrounds. The graying of characters only lasts for the current page in the current session. If you paste new text into the Reader or if you go to a new page in the Reader, gray backgrounds will not appear. Gray character backgrounds appear only for currently displayed text after it has been read.
There are two basic ways to review characters in Chinese Toolbox FREE. The first is by levels which we cover here. The second is by date, which is covered in Tutorial 3.
By levels refers to the five level menu items in the Character Review menu: Level 1, Level 2, Level 3, Level 4, and Level 5. At this point, click on Level 1 on the Character Review menu. The following will appear:
Notice that Number of characters at level has the same value as Total number of characters I’m familiar with or can recognize. Unlike By Date review mode, all characters displayed in Level 1 review mode are known. By definition, a Level 1 character means the character is known at Level 1.
The goal of reviewing by level is to help you sort the characters you know well from the ones you don’t know so well. While reviewing at a certain level, besides stopping to think about the character currently displayed, you should consider whether or not to promote the character to the next higher level. Characters that you immediately recognize should be promoted to level 2. Do so by first clicking in the data frame labeled From 1 to 5, I understand this character at level. Then press 2 to change the character’s level to level 2. In this tutorial the character 一 (the Chinese character for the number 1) is very familiar to me. So I promote it to level 2 as shown below:
Notice how the value for Number of characters at level has changed from 73 to 72, but Total number of characters I’m familiar with or can recognize is still 73. The former has dropped by one because one character has been removed from the level 1 list; it has been moved to the level 2 list. The later is the sum of all characters from level 1 to level 5 — all characters that you know or are attempting to read without dictionary assistance.
For this tutorial I review all characters at level 1, promoting many of them to level 2. After finishing the review, the screen appears as follows:
Notice how Number of characters at level has dropped to 18. We’re still reviewing at Level 1, but now only 18 characters remain at this level. The other 55 characters have been promoted to level 2.
Now select the Level 2 menu item from the Character Review menu. The following will appear:
Data in the bottom section of the Character Understanding panel shows that we’re now conducting a level 2 review and that there are 55 characters in this level. The upper section shows that 一 (the Chinese character for one) is currently a level 2 character and that I can recognize a total of 73 characters. Since we’ve worked only with levels 1 and 2 in this tutorial, all 73 of these characters exist at one of these two levels.
What we’ve covered for level 1 and level 2 reviewing can be applied in the same manner to levels 3, 4, and 5. The idea behind the levels is that each higher level represents a deeper, more thorough understanding of the Chinese characters. In the current release of Chinese Toolbox FREE, you decide what each of these levels mean.