Tutorial 3: Reviewing Characters by Date
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:
At the end of Tutorial 1, we ended up with 73 recognizable characters. This number appears as the third entry in the Character Understanding panel. Recall that whenever you view a character in Chinese Toolbox FREE, that character is automatically stamped with the current time. When you review known characters, you can take advantage of time-stamping to review characters in date order. Basically, this means that characters you haven’t seen for the longest are presented to you first.
How does this work? First take a look at the frame labeled GMT character timestamp. This shows the timestamp of the character currently displayed in the character dictionary. In the current version of Chinese Toolbox FREE, this timestamp is displayed in GMT time. In an upcoming release of Chinese Toolbox FREE, this timestamp will appear according to your computer’s time zone setting.
There are two basic ways to review characters in the current release of Chinese Toolbox FREE. The first is by levels which is covered in Tutorial 2. Date order reviewing is explained here. In the remainder of this tutorial , we won’t be using the Reader, so it is not shown in any of the screen shots.
When reviewing characters by date, one frame has a major effect on how the date review works. That frame has a very long label, which is Show All time-stamped characters or only Known characters in date mode.
The default value for Show All time-stamped characters or only Known characters in date mode is K. This “K” means “show only K nown characters”. The other possible value would be “A” which means “show All time-stamped characters”.
The remainder of this tutorial describes the default behavior; i.e., reviewing Known characters in date mode.
To begin reviewing characters according to date order, first click on the By Date menu item of the Character Review menu.
The following will appear:
The character initially displayed in the Character Dictionary panel after selecting By Date review mode is the character with the oldest timestamp. In other words, you’ve seen all the other time-stamped characters since you’ve seen this character.
In this tutorial characters numbered 1 through 4 in Character number for level don’t appear because although they are time-stamped, they are not marked as known. If you want to experiment, try setting Show A ll time-stamped characters or only Known characters in date mode to “A”. Then you can see characters 1 through 4. As you view each of these characters, notice the setting From 1 to 5, I understand this character at level. Each of these character has a value of 0 in this frame which means they are NOT known.
Now let’s resume reviewing characters in date mode. Press the right arrow key to display the next (second) character. The following will appear:
Now press the right arrow again to display the third character in date order.
The Character number for level values for the first three characters in date order are 5, 6, and 7 respectively. Recall that when a character appears in the character dictionary, the character is timestamped. For those characters already timestamped, the timestamp is updated when the character appears again in the character dictionary. When you are reviewing characters in date order, the value that appears in the GMT character timestamp data frame is the timestamp before being updated for the current display. When you press the right arrow key to go to the next character in date order, the character is first displayed in the character dictionary, then the character’s timestamp is updated. To illustrate this point, press the left arrow key to redisplay the second character in date order (with value of 6 for Char Num for Level).
Notice how the GMT character timestamp value has changed from 2007-08-29 15:16:28 to 2007-08-29 15:51:46.
You could continue reviewing characters in date order by simply pressing the left or right arrow keys on your keyboard. Keep in mind that each time you display a character, the timestamp for that character is updated. Holding down the arrow keys to scroll quickly through all the characters at any level defeats the purpose of time-stamping. As a character appears in the character dictionary, you should stop momentarily to look at and think about the character being displayed. Otherwise, the time-stamping is meaningless.