Chinese Flash Card app

When I began learning Chinese, I did spoken only for some time, but was always attracted to the written language, so one day I was at (I think) the Met Museum in New York and picked up a box of flash cards (ka pian). Or maybe it was some university book store. They were useful and I brought them with me on my vist stint in China in the early 90s. I thought I had them well memorized until I made this app with the kind assistance of Claude Sonnet.

In order to reproduce that experience and take it a bit further, Claude and I (looking over his shoulder), coded up the app “Kapian”, which has 300 characters to help the beginning learner of Chinese get some rote learning in. In addition to the simplified character the app also shows the traditional character next to it. The romanization pronunciations are in pinyin (a very helpful tool for learning how to pronounce things Chinese that would be widely understood in China; if you were to speak Cantonese only in Xi’An, good luck to you).

If the simplified and traditional characters are the same, the traditional will be a bit grayed out, but if there is a difference, the traditional character appears in yellow. Wish I could say I thought of this, but it was Claude’s idea. My idea was to keep score and maintain it over each session. I was surprised how many characters I’ve forgotten, but still managed to eke out a not-so-shabby score.

And a screen keeping a record of the characters I missed in the session (the History link).

Feel free to fork it: Kapian