Character Mine

Character Mine is a self-test program for drilling yourself on your Chinese vocabulary, characters and tones. The vocabulary test consists of a flash-card type test which you would typically do in both directions, i.e. Chinese to English, where the test just consists of correctly recognizing the character, and English to Chinese where you have to type the characters or enter them with your preferred IME. The program keeps track of which items you have learned, which are due for review and which you are currently studying, so it will always test you on those that are most due first. The tests are calibrated to be taken daily, the program lets you know when you have reached your daily study goal. If you wish to carry on testing you can, the program will continue loading items even if it has to recycle items you already studied in the same day. The character test consists of using your mouse or stylus to draw Chinese characters from memory. When it introduces new characters to you it first teaches you the order and direction of each stroke in a way that is similar to the popular website "Skritter" (skritter.com). The characters that the program gives you to study are the same ones you are studying in your daily vocab tests, so the tests are relevant to you. It introduces characters in order of frequency within that database, so you always learn more frequent characters first. The tone test consists of a multiple-choice listening exercise where you have to distinguish between a set of minimal pairs, i.e. words that differ in only one phonological aspect. In this case they are two-character words with the same pronunciation except for the tones. It is the same technique adopted by the English textbook "Ship or Sheep?", and which has been applied to Chinese tones on the website "Ma or ma?" (maorma.com), also by the author of this software. The program also offers a Review test, in which users are tested on instances of a frequent character. It does this by flashing instances of the character in different words and expressions which the user has to correctly type into an input box. This test is good for practicing speed reading and reinforcing high frequency characters. The flash speed is configurable. You need to have at least six instances of a character in your data store before the program can test you in this way, so the test will not be available until you have been studying for a while. Finally, there are also category tests, as the program lets you assign vocab items to any number of categories. Thus, for example if you are planning to take a flight to China you might review items you have associated with airports and travelling. Character Mine lets you add new vocabulary in a number of ways. You can add items directly from the dictionary which comes with it, the 120,000+ item community-maintained CC-EDict dictionary which is included in XML format. You can add items manually by typing in the characters, pinyin and definition, and you can import items from other compatible software, for example Anki. The program has been in development since 2006 and is used daily by the author who tends to be very responsive to feature requests and bug reports through the associated forum.