Learning Chinese, the 21st century way

This was published on a personal blog I ran during the nillies, it’s included here as a historical archive. Links and images may be broken, it’s been a while.

There are a lot of great websites and free software apps to assist in studying the Chinese language. Just today on Chinese-Forums I discovered ZDT, and I’m already hooked. I had been thinking about starting an open source flashcard application in PHP, but now there’s really no need for that any more.

ZDT is written in java, using the Eclipse rich client platform. This is a big plus since java is naturally cross-platform, personally I’m also quite fond of the Eclipse UI, so the look-and-feel is very familiar. It allready contains a lot of words, and it’s easy to create new sets of flashcards. Obviously there are still some bugs and missing features, but at version 0.4.8 it’s already a very useful program.

Another program I’ve used extensively while studying chinese is Stardict. This is a dictionary program that can be used for a multitude of languages, just get the dictionary files you need from the stardict website. For instance I have Dutch-English, French-English, Chinese-English, German-English and some other interesting ones installed. A cool feature is the ‘scan’ mode, just select any word in your browser, wordprocessor or any other app and watch a pop-up appear with all the translations available.

In other free sofware news : the new Ubuntu Linux distribution, Dapper Drake is nearing completion. First release is scheduled for the first of june. If I find the time during my exams I’ll write a review of Kubuntu, the KDE variant.