If you're studying Chinese, we at http://www.trainchinese.com would like to recommend a magical tool we’re developing and using every day: trainchinese. This is an application for iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, Android phones, Java phones, desktop computers, and online, which helps you to acquire vocabulary through a system of flashcards, based on the spaced repetition system: you learn several times, at regular intervals, a character or a word – how to read it, its pronunciation, how to translate it from English, and how to write it – until you know the word.
I’m a little bit lazy, so I don't want to have to check out by myself the characters or words I need to review regularly, even though it’s the key to success in Chinese. So that’s why I like this application because it does the work for me! The character or word will always appear at the right moment, just before I forget it, so that I learn the word again, again and again. And after that, I can say that I know it by heart!
I also enjoy the very complete built-in Chinese/English dictionary, where I can search by English, pinyin (with or without spaces) and even strokes: if you don’t know the pinyin for a character, you draw it on the screen, and you find it. That's quite useful, isn’t it?
You can download and use the application for free, and get enough flashcards per week for a basic learning program. But I advise you to subscribe, first of all because it’s not expensive: $3.50 per month, second of all because you will definitely love it, and you will need to get more from this application!
Why not give it a go and let us know what you think? We’d love to hear from you:
cs [at] trainchinese.com.
EM