Greetings from hot and muggy Taiwan!
I’ve been in contact with some of you in recent while and I always find it fascinating to hear about your individual approaches to study and how you use the material provided in the Premium section, as well as what I can do to improve the presentation for your individual applications. As mentioned in the last podcast update, I’m now working on creating more resources that can be used offline. One approach is to go the PDF route, which I still plan to do.
In the meantime though I’ve created a couple of pages that you may find interesting. They provide a listing of all the dialogue lines in various formats. The formatting has intentionally been reduced to a minimum to allow easy cut and pasting. Please let me know what you think of this format and whether it is something you find useful or not. If you have suggestions for other ways it can be presented that would help you out, do let me know as well.
These pages show content for all lessons if you are logged in, or lessons 1 to 4 if you aren’t.
Hi Adam, Wow! you have been busy. I copied and pasted the Simplified, Pinyin plus English translation into a Word file. Worked a treat! I’m not sure how it would go for someone without the correct fonts but I am very happy with your simple solution. Exactly what I needed! Well done and thanks for being so responsive.
I copied the simplified, pinyin and English one to a Word Document as well. 55 pages of dialogue!!
It is useful because sometimes I print out the lessons I’ve learned and go over it with some chinese friends or exchange partners here.
Daniel, I have since updated the pages to include not only the dialogues but also any supplementary / broken down vocabulary so that should give you even more to work from.
Wow, this is really handy. What I did was print it to PDF. I used the open source PDFCreator driver.
I like the hanzi only, nice and compact, a versatile format to use with other programs, and a good tool for revision (substitute the pinyin version if that’s what you learn). I’ve pasted it into a word processor, using a two column setup, and printed out the first few pages to start revision. Anything I can read straight away gets coloured red with a highlighter pen, or yellow if I only got it after a bit of head scratching, and what I don’t know stays white, for now. It’s amazing how much of this thing I could colour in!
This simple list is my favourite. It’s perfect for pasting into a spreadsheet, and two different lists (e.g. pinyin and simplified) could be pasted into different columns and should line up correctly. Then you could export that as a tab delimited file, arranged into whatever sequence format you need for some other program. If you print it it’s not huge, err, only a little bit huge.
The hanzi-only file can be coverted/saved as GB2312 or Big5 to use on a Palm PDA with CJKOS. Either use a text editor to read/modify on the PDA, or use something like Plucker to make a reading file, or… whatever. It’s nice and compact, and a good summary of what we know so far. If I corner some helpful but overly cautious Mandarin speaker, I can say please skim through these pages/screens and you’ll get a quick idea of what I can talk about already.
Other good uses are coming to mind all the time, but here’s a bit of fun: select a pretty font like Kai, and make a book cover by cutting up little angular chunks of the hanzi printout, and photocopying the mixed up pieces onto an A3 sheet of paper which you then wrap around a book. When some disbeliever points and challenges you to read some of it, mei wenti, you can be sure it’ll be something you’ve already studied!
So simple, so powerful, so helpful, so much fun. Thank you!
Excellent comments! Believe it or not, it’s actually pretty easy for me to create new versions of the content. And the nice thing is that once I create a template, it will automatically get updated with material from the new lessons, so if there is a modification you would like that will help you out (as shown by the comments there are lots of great learning styles and uses for this material out there), let me know and I’ll add it to the list above.