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onebir -

Ok - this is quite cheeky; so first of all thanks very much to Bogleg for actually writing ZDT and
giving it away...

To set the scene, one of the frustrating things about learning chinese is the split between the
spoken and written language. Especially for me - a not writing, slightly reading, fluent-ish
speaker who'd like to improve my vocab for speaking and reading purposes. This takes massive
controlled repeated visual and aural exposure to new vocabulary. For me, anyhow...

So I'd like to be able to do is import chinese texts into a corpus, segment them, and
automatically generate a list of single or multi-character new vocabulary. And using built in
frequency data, to be able to completely exclude items way above my level, or filter them out when
being 'tested' on flash cards.

For bridging the 语言/文字 divide, I'd like to have some way of integrating speech and text.
Ideally there would be two ways to do this:
1) using text to speech. i'd like to be able to generate chinese english MP3 word lists from the
filtered flashcard results.

(i just had a go at doing this with excel, but because the text to speech voice has to be set in
the control panel, it's beyond my limited VBA abilities the
[url="http://www.euroasiasoftware.com/ht/index.html"]euroasiasoftware/URL] chinese homework
trainer can do it, but doesn't seem terribly stable on my pc)

2) somehow linking the texts with associated sound files (i remember reading there's an XML format
for this - i guess ZDT would have to incorporate a viewer of this format) and being able to dig up
example sentences from text-MP3 corpus, for use in 'aural flashcard tests' and/or generating MP3
word lists in this format:
chinese word, example in sentence, english word

(incidentally, it would probably make sense to record separate data for recognition of words
aurally and visually. (context free) visual recognition is probably harder than aural recognition,
which i think would have to be in context because chinese is so homophonic.)

Another difficulty i have is a 'word/character' divide. There are some characters i recognise in
commonly used words, but have trouble with standalone. (eg 旅游 - if i see these separately i
can never remember which is which). I imagine other people have similar difficulties, so a way of
automatically tagging components of multi character words to their components would be useful.

Some way of tagging easily confused characters - based on a pre-built list of associations, or
user defined - and using these as the distractors in multiple choice questions (or increasing the
probability of their use as distractors) could be helpful.

Taking things to an (even) more complex level, if the software could parse as well as segment
chinese, perhaps it could trawl the corpus for sentences with similar grammatical structures to
textbook example sentences. (preferably filtering out ones that use to much unfamiliar vocabulary).

A final level of complexity would be to allow parallel corpuses: chinese and english side by side.
The user could then search for chinese cognates of english phrases. (and if the software could
also parse english grammar based on an example sentence, chinese cognates of english grammatical
structures)

I recognise implementing these things would take a hundreds or thousands of programmer hours. But
once implemented, it would create an environment that would allow learneres to take any source of
chinese text (with or without audio) and get 100% out of the embodied vocabulary and grammar.

And I'm just too lazy to do it the hard way :p



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bogleg -

Hi Onebir,

Wow, that's quite a list. One of the things I was hoping for when developing the ZDT and by making
it open source was that people could extend the program to do more ambitious things like you're
suggesting. Unfortunately at the moment, I've been pretty swamped by my real life job so ZDT
development has slowed to a standstill since the last release. When I get more time though, I'd
love to talk to you in more detail about some of these features and maybe we can look to getting
some of them implemented.

Thanks

Chris










onebir -

Hi Chris
to be honest, i don't understand how someone with a real job has managed to find the time to take
ZDT as far as it's gone!

onebir










Fu Da-Wei -

The only significant item on "my" wishlist is somehow generating worksheets from multi-character
hanzi. As it stands now, unless I'm missing something fundamental, you can only generate
worksheets from single characters. The user can circumvent this by chopping up the compound into
its constituent parts -- but surely that could be automated.

At the moment, I often keep two separate lists of words:
-----Vocabulary I wish to learn (using the flashcard module, for example)
-----That same vocabulary broken down into single characters, so that I can print worksheets.

Just a thought ...

;)










thph2006 -

Three additional requests:
1. Can a control be added to allow a user to restart a flashcard list where it was stopped the
previous session? Imagine lists of several hundred words that you just don't have time to complete
in a single session. It would be nice to be able to pick up where you left off when you return.

2. Allow for independent sizing of characters, pinyin and definition text in flashcards. Sometimes
I need to increase the font size of the characters to really pick up all the detail but increasing
the font size for all fields tends to make the definition text dominate the screen, especially
when it is lengthy. It would be really nice for my old eyes to have the Chinese characters at
something like 28-32 point and English text at 12 point.

3. Allow for display of pinyin using tone marks or tone numbers. This is another old eyes problem.
Sometimes it's hard for me to distinguish the different tone marks when the font is below 18
point. Numbers are easier to distinguish than tone marks. Of course this feature wouldn't be
necessary if Request #2 were implemented since I could just jack up the pinyin font size.

thanks!










Luobot -

I recently discovered ZDT, here on the forums, and really love this program more than any other
that I’ve paid good money for. There are a few enhancements that I would like to see, but the
single-most important thing to me was mentioned by Onebir, already, and I would just like to add
to it a little bit.

In short, the single-most important thing is sound, not text-to-speech, but good old-fashioned,
warm-blooded human speech. I have lots of real, live native Mandarin speaking sound files that I
would like to attach to the words in ZDT. I can also see exchanging sound files with others, just
like the ZDT word lists, though my primary goal at the moment is to link up my own sound files.

This would not be to replace the current sound function (F3), but would be in addition to it (say,
F4 or whatever), so that it would be possible to hear an entry both ways (e.g., F3 and F4).
Ideally, there would be two ways to attach a sound file, manually (one at a time), and in batch
mode (as in the import function). The manual method could work by right clicking a word and
selecting “Add SoundFile”, causing a “Browse” dialog window to pop, where the user then
locates the file on their hard drive. The user can enter the path or browse to it. The batch
method could work like the current import a category function. The user would identify to ZDT a
text file that contains either characters or pinyin, followed by a delimiter, followed by the path
where the sound file is located. If characters are used, then the sound file would be attached to
that exact matching character combination in the dictionary. If pinyin is used, then the sound
file would be attached to all exact matching pinyin entries. So, for example, 是 would result in
one row being updated. But ‘shi4’ would result in about 39 rows being updated (using the
CEDICT dictionary as an example). Using pinyin is therefore more efficient for this purpose, as a
single sound file would be applied to all exact instances of this phonetic.

I wonder if this is a feature that others would also love to have … and what about the idea of
being able to exchange sound files with each other, just like word lists can be exchanged?










bogleg -

Hi Luobot,

That's an interesting suggestion for adding sound files. What format are your sound files in? Are
they sentences/phrases or are they single sounds? If it's the latter, you can already create your
own custom sound plugin and use them. But attaching a sound (in general) to an entry is a cool
idea. I won't promise anything, but I will look into it.

Chris










Luobot -

Hi Chris –

Thanks for responding! I’m creating sound files in WAV (uncompressed PCM) format, but I can
convert them to another format, if that matters. Note, when I say “creating” I mean
downloading from other sources and editing them. I use WAV so as to preserve sound quality while
editing.

I’m doing words (consisting of any number of syllables), phrases (consisting of a few words),
and longer sentences (the sort that you would put a period at the end of). I am presently
interested in matching sounds up to the words that already exist in your version of the CEDICT
dictionary, though it should work the same for any dictionary that contains the matching word.
Including phrases and sentences would be a very interesting possibility, but it’s probably a
separate project. I’m guessing that it wouldn’t be hard: Just create a custom dictionary of
phrases and sentences and presumably everything else should work the same. But I’m new to ZDT,
so you would know better than I.

I was thinking that it would be easy for ZDT to pass the fully qualified drive:\path\filename.ext
to the Operating System (i.e., Windows) and the System would then run the user’s default player
for that filetype. Therefore, it doesn’t matter what format the file is in, as long as you have
a player for it on your system. It could even be a video file that describes the history of that
particular word.

This would provide several benefits:
1 – Chaining together single syllable sounds doesn’t take into account tone changes. A simple
example is, ‘Bu4 Yao4’ should be pronounced ‘Bu2 Yao4’. And of course there are all the
intricacies of consecutive third tones. Using a soundfile that was originally spoken as a single
word provides a more accurate pronunciation tool.
2 – Provides a more natural sounding alternative to F3.
3 – Affords the ability to keep improving the quality of the sound file by substituting a better
one, whenever the opportunity arises.
4 – Affords the ability to play other media files, such as video files that the user wishes to
associate with the word.

Please let me know what you think … Thanks!










flameproof -

1: To make it start faster

2: Import from Pleco

3: can paste a group of characters into a folder (currently can only do one at a time)










onebir -



Quote:

1 – Chaining together single syllable sounds doesn’t take into account tone changes.

I think text to speech would do this - although another thread here suggests the free chinese
voice isn't great. It would also allow ZDT to read out example sentences. Flashcards (visual or
audio) in the format 'chinese word/english word' have a major flaw in the sense that they don't
provide examples of how to use the word (eg where it goes in the sentence) - so an example
sentence field would be a major plus.

Even if text to speech is too tricky - & I have no idea of the technicalities - being able to
associate english (or whatever) sound as well as chinese would make it possible to produce
chinese-english audio flashcards - far more useful than isolated chinese words (especially when
they're monosyllables :p)...












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