I’ve got a Handspring Visor Edge B&W Palm thingy. I’ve read many posts about software available but am still confused about a few things:
If I get a flash card system such as the Supermemo or Anki one, do I also need to buy some sort of Chinese OS in order to enter Chinese characters using pinyin etc?
Is it possible to download flashcards rather than entering them all myself? I don’t like the thought of having to enter all the vocabularly from the first couple of TLI Mandarin books.
Are the flashcard systems very flexible? I mean, if for each word I have the Chinese character(s), pinyin and English, is it possible to sometimes just show the character(s), sometimes the character(s) AND pinyin etc…?
How useful is the Pleco E&C Dictionary? Do you use it just to look up vocab or can it be used as a learning tool itself?
If I get a flash card system such as the Supermemo or Anki one, do I also need to buy some sort of Chinese OS in order to enter Chinese characters using pinyin etc?[/quote]
Yes, you will need a Chinese system to display Chinese characters with SuperMemo. I don’t know about Anki. The Pleco Oxford dictionary also has a flashcard function, which is basic now but will reportedly be greatly updated on the next release.
Yes, if you can hook up with like-minded people. Search the archives, someone (sorry, I forgot precisely who – was it miltownkid??) was offering SuperMemo files for the Shita AV Chinese books. Don’t know about the TLI books. But it shouldn’t take that long to enter vocabulary – you’d have to write them for handwritten flashcards anyway. Think of it as intensified learning.
SuperMemo is extremely flexible. You can set up your decks to quiz you by displaying any one or several of six fields on either side of the “card”. You can also look at the front or the back “side” first as you prefer. You can also mess with font size, boldface, and other stuff like that.
I should think Pleco’s Oxford dictionary should be quite sufficient for most students in the first couple of years of Chinese. It’s not bad for listening, because you can look up words without the precise tone numbers (but I still prefer using the Lanbridge Pinyin dictionary for this, even though it’s hard copy; you get better “hits” with it so far, but Pleco might address this point later on). It does have flash card functions built in, and according to the latest e-mail update from Pleco, they’re improving the functionality of the flash cards considerably on the next release.