Inspiration
_ Now more than ever, learning Chinese is critically important for everyone. This app was inspired by my own journey of learning Chinese with further inspiration from Pimsleur audio lessons and Pleco's Chinese learning app. _
What it does
_ Every lesson contains a very simple conversation with short sentences. There is a lot of repetition of vocabulary. Each sentence contains the Chinese text, pinyin and a translation. _
How we built it
_ I started with the UI, followed by the code for the back end, and then made adjustments to both. _
Challenges we ran into
_ How to program all the lesson content into the app without repetitive code. I eventually settled on putting all the sentences into an array in my strings.xml resource file, although I am sure there is a better way. Another challenge was getting the UI design and layout just right. _
Accomplishments that we're proud of
_ This was my first time using an array in an xml file. Also, I am excited about helping others learn Chinese. _
What we learned
_ I learned that there is a lot I still have to learn about programming. Had I known how to parse text files in Java, this project would have been a lot easier. Another valuable revelation is how much any little change on the front end can impact the back end and vice versa. _
What's next for Study Chinese
_ There will eventually be 500 lessons in all containing the 5,000 most frequently used words in Chinese. I would also like to add settings to toggle between Simplified and Traditional characters, Mandarin and Cantonese pronunciation and English and Spanish translations of each sentence. _
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