ZDT 0.7.0 New and Noteworthy.
November 5th, 2007
The latest and greatest ZDT 0.7.0 final release is now available. If you’re still on 0.6.1, you should find quite a bit of new stuff. People that have been playing around with the beta and rc releases will notice a variety of bug fixes and performance improvements. Thanks to all the people who have helped contribute to this release. If you find this program useful, please consider helping out or making a donation. Your support is what allows ZDT development to continue.
New features since 0.6.1
- Character and pinyin fonts can be changed individually.
- Stroke Order Animations are now accessible via hotkey (F5). Works in dictionary, flashcard, and category editors.
- Pinyin Recall Mode can now be configured to show character only, definition only or both. (Thanks to Uwe)
- Custom import will now import a better percentage of entries for S P D and T P D patterns.
- Self Review mode improvements. Can now show more than one aspect (character, pinyin, definition) on a card at a time. Also, users can now score themselves on the test.
- User database can be changed without restarting application.
- Special characters (like spaces, periods, commas, etc) can now be included in pinyin and character fields.
- Interval flashcard testing. The better you know a flashcard, the less often it gets shown to you. Shamelessly copied from the excellent flashcard program IFlash.
- Resume last flashcard session. If you close the program or stop a flashcard session in the middle, you will now have the option to resume from where you left off.
- Multiple sound plugin support. If you have multiple sound plugins installed, they will both be available to you to play. NOTE: The old sound plugin will not work from this version on. Please download the net.sourceforge.zdt.sound.adso or net.sourceforge.zdt.sound.roddy sound plugins instead.
- Roddy sound plugin available. Sounds given to me by Roddy from chinese-forums.com. Male voice, no neutral tones.
- Keyboard hotkeys can be changed via preferences.
- A ton of bugs have also been fixed. Take a look at the changelog for more details.
Entry Filed under: ZDT
7 Comments Add your own
1. Ole | November 5th, 2007 at 2:55 pm
I just downloaded ZDT 0.7.0 and tried the flashcards.
I am really impressed with the looks, the sounds, the statistics, the resume option and everything.
thank you very much for your fantastic work,
Ole
2. Harald | November 6th, 2007 at 10:57 am
After having tried ZDT quite some time ago but when worked solely with PlecoDict the 0.7.0 release has finally made me return to ZDT on my Linux laptop. Thank you for all the work you have invested in improving ZDT up to this point.
A suggestion though: maybe you are interested in this feature — while a browser is already included why not providing an explicit reader functionality, where texts can be imported accompanying flash card lessons. This would allow the texts to be stored together with flashcard data, which is not possible with the browser (at least I’m not aware of this).
Is there a possibility to control the font settings for the vocabulary list view? Currently, it seems that since SWT uses GTK the system-wide font settings takes over. Unfortunately, at least with KDE there is only little control over mixing and matching proper western fonts with Chinese fonts. Any workaround possible?
3. Chris | November 7th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
Hi Harald,
One of the things on my plate to do is to add the ability to attach various user defined things to flashcards such as free-form text, images, and sounds. I think that’s what you’re suggesting, but I’m not sure.
Have you tried adjusting the fonts from the preferences? Are you looking for more fine grained control? By default it will use the system font, but you should be able to change to something else.
Chris
4. Tom | January 8th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
Hi Chris,
Many, many thanks for zdt. If I ever manage to learn Chinese it will be due in a large part to your generous efforts in making this program both very useful and freely available. Xie xie ni.
I do have a question on usage which may be a bit more general than just my own needs. In trying to learn the language I need to develop two-way mappings between any pair from the set of sounds (pin yin), characters, and meanings. That’s six different mappings: sound to character, sound to meaning, character to sound, character to meaning, meaning to sound, meaning to character. Is there a good way to track my performance in each of these mappings separately?
For example if I recognize a character and know its meaning, but am unable to remember its sound, I’d like to have the character show up more frequently when I’m testing my character to sound mapping and less frequently when I’m testing my character to meaning mapping. My current approach to doing this is to have multiple copies of word lists, and then make sure I only run one test type in each list. This works after a fashion, but I’m wondering whether there might be a better way.
How do you handle this issue? Or is this a problem that will fade away as my knowledge of Chinese improves over time?
Best Wishes,
–Tom
5. arthur chen | January 15th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
Hi
I’m new to this and need a guidance comment. I have a Mac and have download ZDT. When I download the word list, they come in TextEdit and I don’t know how to make the Chinese characters appear. the two columns for simplified and traditional have strange symbols.
Is there someplace I can go to work this out?
Thanks for any response. aschenjr@gmail.com
Art Chen
6. Chris | January 15th, 2008 at 10:09 pm
Hi Art,
Just save the word lists to disk, and use the import function in ZDT to read them in.
Chris
7. yakup | February 21st, 2008 at 5:56 am
Hi Chris
I am using this wonderful program from six moths. It improved my vocabulary. One little suggestion. In flash card can you add a sample sentence and three or four word which the character have been used.
Thanks for this excellent free program
yakup
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