The Chinese Learner's Palm Pilot

Over time I have installed several programs that make my Palm OS based PDA an ideal Chinese language study tool. I will list them here, and provide more in-depth reviews later on. BTW, I know they aren't called Pam Pilots any more, but writing about the "Chinese Learner's Palm" sounds a bit strange.

Here are the useful tools I have found:

CJKOS

CJKOS stands for the Chinese-Japanese-Korean operating system. It provides two features, the ability to work in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters or letters, and the ability to have standard applications display Chinese menus and icons. My main interest is working with Chinese characters, so that is what I will talk about here. CJKOS will display Chinese characters in pretty much any application on the Palm. It supports several font sizes and includes both Simplified and Traditional fonts. It also includes hi-res fonts for PDAs such as the Sony Clie which have 320x320 pixel screens. CJKOS has several methods of data entry, although I only really understand one, Pinyin. Fortunately this is all I need. As you enter the Pinyin you will see a progressively smaller list of matching characters. When you see the one you want you select it and continue to the next character.

Oxford Concise English & Chinese Dictionary for Palm OS

This is a very well-designed dictionary. The designers put a lot of thought into the design to provide a program that provides features that take advantage of the PDA. There is a price to pay for this, but it is well worth it. The text of the dictionary comes from the Concise English-Chinese Chinese-English Dictionary, which I have written about previously. This provides a dictionary with solid scholarship behind it and a good selection of vocabulary. You can look up words by Pinyin, characters written by hand or pasted in, and by radical. The handwriting recognition is licensed from Motorola and is quite slick. You write the character and it gives you a list of most likely matches. The program supports both Traditional and Simplified fonts, and you can instantly switch between them if you have the requisite files installed. You can use the program with CJKOS or with its own fonts.

Supermemo

Supermemo is not specifically a Chinese study program, but rather a very clever flashcard application. One problem with most flashcard programs is that they test all words at the same rate. That means that you get tested on simple words like "dog" as often as you are tested for less frequently used words like "syllogism". This make for really tedious drills. What Supermemo does is provide a daily test of items that you have either missed recently or just need a refresher for. As you answer each test question, you provide your degree of a grade from A to F indicating how well you did. Based on this grade and your prior results Supermemo will reschedule the question test. If you get it wrong you will see it again in one or two days. If you get it right the testing interval will generally double or triple. I have some words that I won't see again until 2008, although the vast majority of them are somewhere in between. Using Supermemo I can manage a set of 6170 vocabulary words, which would be impossible with a regular flashcard system.

Honorable Mention

If you don't want to spend the money on the Oxford dictionary, or just want more definitions, check out KDIC. This is a dictionary engine that uses the CEDICT dictionary from the Internet as well as several others. CEDICT is a very large Chinese-English dictionary, and there is also a reversed version for English to Chinese. The program is inexpensive and unenforced shareware, so it is worth getting if you are considering it at all. The problem with it is that it isn't very polished, so there are a lot of junk symbols that show up on the screen, and it doesn't do handwriting recognition. It has a big dictionary, though, so it can be handy to keep around, at least until the next version of the Oxford dictionary comes out, which will have the ability to use custom dictionaries.