Step Into Chinese is a language-mining tool to assist English speakers seeking to understand the Chinese language. The lack of a one-to-one correspondence between Chinese characters and the corresponding Pinyin is often regarded as the greatest difficulty facing learners of Chinese. Step Into Chinese aims to address this difficulty.
Inside is an extensively cross-referenced data structure which allows the user to pursue deeper understanding of contexts, for example, by “locking on” to a particular Pinyin context and viewing successive instances of the same morpheme used in similar contexts.
The user can also “lock on” to English words in the Pinyin translations, English words in the collective phrase translations, and even Unicode strings used to represent Chinese characters in either traditional or simplified representations.
Frequency information relative to the number of occurrences of each Pinyin morpheme, in each context throughout the data structure, is displayed for each entry.
Features include:
- Extensive cross-referenced data structure with over 26,000 modern Chinese words and concepts involving over 8,300 separate Chinese characters.
- Ability to lock-onto particular character or word and view its usage in various contexts.
- Ability to create and save flashcards.
- Display mode: Singles, Traditional, and Simplified.
- Flashcard style: Pinyin, Translation, Traditional, and Simplified.
- Online help system for keyboard shortcuts.
Website: sourceforge.net/projects/stepintochinese
Support: SourceForge Project Page
Developer: Charles B. Cossé
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
Step into Chinese is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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