I recently decided to learn chinese again. I took chinese lessons at the engineering school, but forgot almost everything! Hopefully I still have the lessons and I have found a cool on-line chinese course with audio samples on chinese-tools.com... but I needed some way to monitor my progresses in vocabulary learning. I quickly checked if there was some vocabulary training tool for Gnome but couldn't find any satisfying tool. I thus decided to start my own tool. As I wanted to learn GTK+ and C# Mono for quite a long time, I have installed monodevelop and started coding. The sources are available under GPL on gitorious but I'm not providing any binary yet: those who want it will need to build it using monodevelop.

Here is a list of the current features, though they might change quickly:

• Definition of a sequence of lessons containing the vocabulary
• The words can be grouped in some tags using drag and drop. This helps to sort the words by lexical field (which is not always the case in the lessons)
• A word is composed of the term in the learned language, its pronunciation and the translation in your language
• Double clicking a word shows some details on it. For the moment, they only include the strokes order for the CJK characters, but we can easily imagine some connection with an on-line dictionary showing synonyms or examples. The strokes order images are directly fetched from the Strokes Order Project on Wikimedia commons.
• The exercise mode asks for both the pronunciation and the word. The results are stored to help see which words are mastered and which need to be learned again.

Here are some screenshots of the application to help you see it without building it first:

Main window

The exercise window

The strokes order

Of course if you wish to use it or improve it, I will appreciate any help and comment. My short term plans for this are:

• Adding some properties to the course, like the author, the learned language
• Adding grammar points to the lessons
• Allowing nested tags

My goal for this application now is not to make it only a vocabulary training tool, but something more complete. The ultimate feature I'ld like to see there is the integration with some TTS with nice voices to speak the words or even have some other exercise based on that for listening comprehension.