I remember using ZDT occasionally a 2 or 3 years ago but last year when I went to China to study, I used ZDT more frequently. There is one function I would have liked: an option for flashcards to run continuously without clicking next, and perhaps with speech. There were times when I was cramming for exams and I wanted to eat (so my hands were busy) and study at the same time. ZDT is fine and great as is, but just thought I’d add my two cents.

Thanks for making ZDT! You are awesome.

Just save the word lists to disk, and use the import function in ZDT to read them in.

Chris

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

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

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

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?

thank you very much for your fantastic work,

Ole