Filed under: iPod Family, iPhone
Learn your ideograms with iChinese
Matthias Huber wrote in to tell us about his new iChinese system that helps you learn your characters. iChinese uses the iPhone's touch-based interface to teach users how to write the characters on-screen. It's available by adding the http://ichinese.de/repo repository to Installer.app. I don't speak Chinese. I don't write chinese (although I'm very fond of chinese food). I wouldn't know an ideogram if I tripped on one, so if you give this a try and have an informed view on how useful it is, let us know in the comments.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
John Williams said 2:06PM on 2-28-2008
Shouldn't it be called MeChinese?
boooooooooo
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dom said 2:23PM on 2-28-2008
"ideogram" is a term for a symbol that refers to an idea without referring to the sounds of a word. By and large this is not true for Chinese. The correct term here is "Chinese character" or "Hanzi" or perhaps even "Kanji", for characters used in a Japanese context.
people who do unicode use a slightly different term, "ideograph", as a technical term to refer to scripts like Chinese. This is unfortunate nomenclature and for the same reasons as given about should be avoided in non-technical contexts.
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Josh said 2:37PM on 2-28-2008
我爸爸很好。你家人呢？
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McFonusr said 2:37PM on 2-28-2008
It's awesome someone was able to do this with Chinese. I wonder if anyone would think to do this with Arabic?
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Josh said 2:49PM on 2-28-2008
Here's hoping that people like this will be able to go "legit" once the SDK comes out.
And while I'm hoping, here's hoping the SDK actually comes out in full form next Thursday.
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Josh said 3:00PM on 2-28-2008
Actually, while I'm in the hoping business, I hope I can scrounge up enough funds to get myself an iPod touch...
中文最牛B! said 2:50PM on 2-28-2008
我很好，你母卡好～
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KenC said 3:29PM on 2-28-2008
iPhone 很 好！
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spriter said 4:22PM on 2-28-2008
Perfect! Along with NativeCn (Chinese input in all apps) my iPhone is now a great tool for improving my Chinese.
Huber先生是很巧妙！ 谢谢您。我爱我的iPhone。
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me said 4:27PM on 2-28-2008
I'd recommend iCosta over NativeCN. Installer repository is at http://iphone.freecoder.org/rep
barry said 6:03PM on 2-28-2008
Very cool, does any body have this kind of thing for Japanese Kanji?
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Josh* said 9:25PM on 2-28-2008
There are iStudy's hiragana and katakana flashcard apps, but that's about it...
Jon Brown said 9:33PM on 2-28-2008
这个顶呱呱
I have noticed the Japanese and Koren flashcards in installer with jealousy for so long. I was hoping for Chinese flashcards on the iPhone for SOOoooo long but this is even better. I didn't think this was even possible.
谢谢!
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CL said 10:16PM on 2-28-2008
I like how everyone started commenting in chinese all of a sudden, you guys cracked me up lol
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SFmoderate said 12:46PM on 3-05-2008
Commie Chinese! Someone bring back traditional characters....
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