Saturday, February 17th, 2007
Greetings!
Well, I have now survived three weeks of taking a formal Mandarin Chinese course, and I love it! Unfortunately for me, I have to learn the required 15 characters per week plus the additional 25 characters that are part of the lesson that I do not already know. So, I am very, very busy. But, it’s a great excuse to use my Macintosh Mandarin Chinese application, Global Talk.
One feature that I’m really starting to love about Global Talk is its Dictionary and Word Select feature. I’m finding that sometimes my deck of flashcards is too big or that I’m tired of seeing certain characters because I already have them memorized. And, sometimes I only want to print 10 characters or so to flashcard, not all of them that are in the database.
With Global Talk, I can bring up a window that allows me to see the entire database. I can use Apple’s Spotlight search capability to find any word that I want, and I can enter part of the English definition or simply enter the character itself, traditional or simplified. And, even better, I can check a “Visible?” box by character to determine which characters should show up in my deck of flashcards.
Here’s a screen shot of the interface:
It’s great to be able to develop my application while taking a Mandarin Chinese course. This has allowed me to use my application how you would use it and to make it better.
Stand by … this type of thinking has also prompted me to completely change how I print the Chinese handwriting practice sheets. More on that very soon!
Take care, and keep learning!
– bk
Saturday, February 3rd, 2007
Hi –
I’ve been a Mandarin Chinese student now for one whole week, and it’s been a great time! My goal was to memorize the Pinyin, definition, character, and tone for 36 characters, and I think I have them memorized. I used Global Talk to help me with my learning, including Flashcards and handwriting practice sheets. It’s been insightful to use Global Talk how a student would use it and has prompted me to re-think some of how Global Talk works. More on that in another post … today, let’s talk about writing Chinese characters.
With Global Talk, I created sheets with grid markings on them to help me achieve “balance” with my characters. The sheets are OK; I can think of one minor tweak that would make them perfect. But, I found that my first two or three attempts at writing the character were great. Then, I noticed that my characters were weak, spaced out, or just looked “funny”. How do I fix this problem?
I went off and researched stroke order. Now, I’ll be honest. I have enough to memorize. Initially, I thought memorizing stroke order would be a waste of time; after all, didn’t I just need to practice, practice, practice? Well, OK, so practicing is VERY important (I’ve written these 36 characters well over one hundred times each in the last six days), but stroke order is VITAL. To be honest, after researching the rules for stroke order, it has made a world of difference in how my characters look. I would not have believed that stroke order was this important, but I cannot emphasize enough how much it is.
There are some general rules of thumb (first, go top to bottom; second, go left to right; etc.), but I’ve found that it’s very helpful to just study each character and how the strokes should appear on the paper. After awhile, you develop a “feel” for what strokes should happen first. It actually gets very intuitive very fast.
And, books help. 
I went out and bought Reading & Writing Chinese: A Guide To The Chinese Writing System.
It’s incredible. It contains 1067 characters stroke-by-stroke (yes, stroke-by-stroke), 3000+ characters total, guidelines on how to write the characters, and it even has write-ups on virtually every character that describe its radical or maybe some history. I highly recommend this book if you are struggling with constructing a beautiful Chinese character.
Well, all of this learning has changed some of how I designed Global Talk (like printing flashcards, the “grid” used to practice calligraphy, etc.), so those things are now on the top of my glitch list.
Good luck with your calligraphy!
– bk
