Communications of COLIPS - an international journal of the Chinese and Oriental Languages

Processing Society, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1993, pp. 31-44.

Computer-Assisted-Learning
for
Learning Chinese Characters

H.C. Lam, K.H. Pun, S.T. Leung, S.K. Tse* and W.W. Ki*
Department of Computer Science and *Department of Curriculum Studies,
The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong.
(First received: 5 Oct, 92; Revised and accepted: 1 Apr, 93)

Abstract
The purpose of this research is to facilitate the learning of
Chinese characters for beginners through designing and implementing
a computer-assisted-learning system on a PC. With the use of
animation, graphics and sound, the origin, written form, pronunciation
and usage of Chinese characters are introduced to the user. Moreover,
understanding of these concepts is deepened by means of
demonstration and practice. To help to enlarge the user's vocabulary,
two games of building characters are provided.

Keywords: Computer-Assisted-Learning, Chinese Computing, Computer Animation,

Computer Graphics, Sound Synthesis and Games of Building Characters

1. Introduction have dictation lesson of Chinese

Learning of Chinese characters language weekly. The primary school
plays an important role in language students have to memorize large
acquisition for Hong Kong children. quantity of vocabulary for the dictation
Reading, writing, listening, speaking, lessons. If they write a character
and thinking are all closely related with incorrectly, they will be asked to do
words. Children cannot express remedial exercise which is to copy the
themselves well without a sufficient correct character many times over. We
vocabulary. But unfortunately, learning have found that teaching by this
Chinese characters is no easy task. method is ineffective and discourages
Many primary school pupils in Hong children to learn Chinese characters.
Kong have painful experience with The main objective of this research is
Chinese characters. They have to write to solve this problem by developing a
at least one page of Chinese characters computer software to help Chinese
daily. Most of the primary schools children learn Chinese characters.
Communications of COLIPS - an international journal of the Chinese and Oriental Languages
Processing Society, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1993, pp. 31-44.
sentences. The characters are also
The learning of Chinese arranged in groups and clusters to help
characters has three aspects: 1. children learn effectively [2], enabling
recognition of characters, 2. acquisition them to retrieve characters from
of characters i.e., retaining in human associated characters in their long term
memory, and 3. use of characters. The memory during writing and reading [3].
first two aspects are the basics for Different media including animation,
beginners and are therefore the sound, music and games are used to
fundamental concerns of our software keep the interest and attention of the
system. young learners.

There are three factors that affect The software is user-friendly.

the learning of Chinese characters: 1. The young learners do not need any
the frequency of use of the characters, computer knowledge to use this
2. the meaningfulness of the characters, program. They can learn Chinese
and 3. imagery value, which measures characters at their own pace and follow
the visual effectiveness of the their own interest. It is recommended
characters to call up associated that parents and teachers accompany
information from the reader's memory. the young learners, providing
The Chinese characters chosen in our explanations whenever necessary and
system are selected according to these participating in the games as well.
three factors. We have selected
Chinese characters which have high The rest of the paper is organized
frequencies of use and are related to a as follows: next section gives an
child's everyday life. It is hoped that overview of the entire system;
children will find these characters followed by detailed descriptions of
interesting and want to learn them. The each of the three components: Chinese
characters chosen are also meaningful Characters, Examples of Chinese
ones so as to enable children to retain Characters and Building Chinese
them easily. Attention is also paid to Characters. Succeeding sections
the imagery values of these characters mention the techniques required to
as characters with high imagery value develop the system; including graphics,
are easier to learn [1]. animation, user interface, sound,
heuristics and data storage. The last
The characters of this software section discusses the future
are not treated individually but as development of the project.
components of words, phrases and
Communications of COLIPS - an international journal of the Chinese and Oriental Languages
Processing Society, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1993, pp. 31-44.
2. Software Overview invoke a function, the user can use the
The system is called "Han ". mouse to position the cursor and click
The software employs windows the button. In addition, keyboard input
and mouse as its user interface. Each is also allowed. Each part of the system
window performs a particular function, will now be described.
as revealed in Figure 1 below. To

Figure 1 Han's Windows

2.1 "Introduction " any key.

This part precedes the main
body and briefs on the whole research 2.2 "Table of Contents "
project. This part follows the
Accompanied with a rhythmic "Introduction" part and on the window,
melody, the caption, "Han~ Computer- this part displays three components of
Assisted-Learning for Learning the system: "Chinese Characters",
Chinese Characters" commences the "Examples of Chinese Characters" and
system. Next come the preface and the "Building Chinese Characters" (See
acknowledgments of ours. Finally, Figure 5).
words from the authors (See Figure 4)
end this part. 2.3 "Chinese Characters "
For the sake of convenience, This part contains a number of
the user can skip this part by pressing pages, explaining the concepts of
Communications of COLIPS - an international journal of the Chinese and Oriental Languages
Processing Society, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1993, pp. 31-44.
Chinese characters. Students have full 2.4.2 "Stroke Sequence "
discretion to go through any pages In this part, students can switch
according to their own progress (See between demonstration and practice.
Figure 6). The contents cover the For demonstration, the software
origin, evolution, building, stroke depicts the writing of each stroke of
writing and character writing of the Theme Character; for example,
Chinese characters. showing the character from
to to to (See Figure
2.4 "Examples of Chinese 9).
Characters " For practice, the software
This part gives examples of draws the Theme Character in outline
Chinese characters. It consists of a and thereafter each stroke of the
total of 42 lessons (See Appendix i). In character is associated with a button. If
each lesson, one Chinese character the student presses the buttons in the
(which is called the Theme Character ) correct order, the software will draw
will be used to explain the notions of the character stroke by stroke. Upon
origin, stroke sequence, pronunciation completion, the correct writing will be
and related characters. demonstrated again. However, during
The selected characters are practice, if the wrong button is pressed,
typical examples of Chinese characters; no response will come from the
namely, and others. system.
The selection are based on [4]. To
provide a useful index, these characters 2.4.3 "Pronunciation "
are categorized into five groups: This part adopts the
Human Body, Animal, Nature, Tool demonstration-and-practice model as
and Others (See Figure 7). well.
For demonstration, the Theme
2.4.1 "Origin " Character is pronounced through the
This part uses vivid drawings to external speaker (See Figure 10).
arouse the interest of the students to For practice, the software
learn. Animation portrays how the produces different pronunciations for
Theme Character evolves from the Theme Character, and students
hieroglyphics to its present form. For have to judge whether they are correct.
example, in the lesson , the body This part is conducted in
of a walking cartoon figure gradually Cantonese, which is the dialect spoken
transforms into the character (See by over 90% of the population in Hong
Figure 8). Kong.
Communications of COLIPS - an international journal of the Chinese and Oriental Languages
Processing Society, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1993, pp. 31-44.
to form the character [5].
2.4.4 "The Related " But of course not all pairs of pieces can
This part applies the principle combine to form valid characters. The
of association to increase the student's purpose of the games is to improve the
vocabulary. student's ability to tell the valid
Firstly, the Theme Character is characters from the invalid ones.
displayed with three other related
characters, from which the student 2.5.1 "Fishing "
chooses one character to proceed. For Each player is given five pieces.
example, if the Theme Character is He, in turn, baits the fish on board and
, then and then draws a bait from the pack. If the
,which are all related to , baits on hand cannot catch a fish, he
will be displayed (See Figure 11). puts one of his baits onto the board.
Secondly, once a related The more the fish he catches, the
character is chosen, three phrases higher the scores he obtains (See
containing the chosen character are Figure 12).
given, from which the student chooses
one. For example, if is chosen by 2.5.2 "Pairing Up "
the student, then In this game, each player is
and will be offered to the given seven pieces. He, in turn, draws
student. a piece from the pack; or matches the
Finally, a sentence using the piece just given away by the other
selected phrase will be displayed to player with one of his own. In either
illustrate its usage. For example, for case, the player has to put one of his
the phrase , the sentence pieces onto the table. The player who
will be can first pair up his pieces into four
shown. characters will win the game (See
Figure 13).
2.5 "Building Chinese Characters
" For both games, players are
This part consists of two games provided with three aids -- "Substitute",
-- "Fishing" and "Pairing Up". The idea "Rules of the Game" and "Dictionary".
of these games is based on the left-
right orthographic characteristic of 2.5.3 "Substitute "
Chinese characters, whereby complex A blank piece represents a wild
characters are built from simpler card, which the player can designate to
character pieces. For example, the represent any suitable piece. For
piece can combine with the piece example, the piece can combine
Communications of COLIPS - an international journal of the Chinese and Oriental Languages
Processing Society, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1993, pp. 31-44.
with a blank piece to form the mouse.
character by substituting a For the software, it requires the
for the blank (See Figure 14). MS-DOS version 3.3 operating system.

2.5.4 "Rules of the Game " 3.2 Technology Required

This part states the rules of the The technology required for the
playing game (See Figure 15). development of the software can be
summarized into six areas.
2.5.5 "Dictionary "
Players can look up this part to 3.2.1 Computer Graphics
check the validity of character formed Turbo C graphics library [6]
by combining two pieces. Moreover, if provides the most fundamental
the character is valid, its meaning will drawing facilities such as plotting pixel
be detailed (See Figure 16). and drawing rectangles.
More sophisticated drawing are
2.6 "Help " accomplished by accessing the
This part, which can be invoked registers and invoking the interrupts,
at any time, describes the functions of which are built on the EGA / VGA
the current window and provides display interface. These include direct
instructions to users who need help reading and writing the Video Memory
(See Figure 17-18). Planes and adjusting the RGB values
of the colors [7].
Besides, bitmaps are frequently
3. Design and Development of used for graphics rendering to achieve
the Software a higher picture quality. A picture on
paper is first scanned into a TIFF file
3.1 Developing and Operating by a scanner. The file is then processed
Environment by an image editor [8], which removes
"Han" runs on personal the flaws existing on the crude picture
computers. It was written in the C and makes further enhancements such
language, using Turbo C 2.0 compiler as coloring the black and white image.
of the Borland International Inc. [6]. Finally, the bitmap is loaded onto the
For the hardware, it requires an memory planes for display during run
IBM 286 / 386 or compatible, which time. This process is depicted in
has to be equipped with a 40M hard Figures 2 below.
disk, an AD converter with external
speaker, an EGA / VGA display and a
Communications of COLIPS - an international journal of the Chinese and Oriental Languages
Processing Society, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1993, pp. 31-44.

Figure 2 Bitmap Manipulation

Actually, Chinese display is changes into a small rectangle at point

also an application of bitmap. However, B, its position and size attributes are
some character bitmap can simply be modified accordingly.
obtained from existing Chinese Linear Interpolation uses mean
software [9]. The sizes of the character values to determine the attributes of an
bitmap used in this software include object (in particular the size attribute)
24x24 and 40x40 pixels. between two time instances. For
Fading is applied as a transition example, when a rectangle moves from
effect. Each window will fade in point A to point B, its size during the
before the next one appears. To movement will vary linearly with its
achieve the effect, each time the RGB distance from point A.
values of an image colors is reduced by
one third until the image completely 3.2.3 User Interface Management
vanishes. WIMP is the abbreviation for
Window, Icon, Menu and Pointing
3.2.2 Computer Animation device. Since software using WIMP as
The animation used in this interface is easy to learn and operate,
software is prepared by the Computer- WIMP sets the trend of current
Aided-Animation. This software uses software developments. Our system
two basic concepts for animation -- also employs part of the WIMP
Object-Oriented Graphics and Linear interface, including window and
Interpolation [10]. mouse.
Object-Oriented Graphics Our experience is that
represents a picture by a number of programming with pointing device is
graphical objects. Common examples not a difficult task because adequate
of objects are lines, circles and bezier service routines are available on the
curves. Each object has several BIOS [11] and the mouse driver.
attributes associated with it such as its
position, color and size. Hence, to play 3.2.4 Sound Synthesis
back an animation is to advance the To meet different hardware
attributes of all the concerned objects requirements, this software uses two
at a particular time order. For example, different sound channels.
if a large rectangle located at point A PC internal speaker has a
Communications of COLIPS - an international journal of the Chinese and Oriental Languages
Processing Society, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1993, pp. 31-44.
simple structure. Its frequency can be They provide information for the
arbitrarily modified; however, its system's decision making. An example
amplitude must be fixed. It is only of factual data used in decision making
suitable for producing monotonous is the frequency of each character piece
music. to form valid characters.
AD converter [12] can
transform analog signals for audio 3.2.6 Data Storage
equipment into digital signals for Since animation, processing
computers and vice versa. To record bitmaps and sound synthesis require
and produce sounds at will, two steps enormous amount of data, storage
are involved. First, sound is recorded often becomes the bottleneck in the
from a microphone and digitized at a system's performance. One obvious
high sampling rate (10,000 Hz in our solution of course is to upgrade the
system). The digitized samples are fed hardware but in view of the stringent
to a software for noise filtering. The budget of the primary schools in Hong
resulting samples are then stored in the Kong, we have decided to alleviate the
computer. To reproduce sounds, the problem by software and trade time for
samples are retrieved and transmitted space.
to a speaker through the AD converter. For the main memory, our
Since AD converter can produce strategy is to retain most of the
sounds of high accuracy, it is used for working data on hard disk and load
pronunciation demonstration in our them into main memory only when
system. necessary. Inevitably, this reduces the
execution speed of the system.
3.2.5 Artificial Intelligence For the hard disk, our system
Since the computer has to makes use of other compressing
compete with the users in the games of software to pack up the data files and
Building Chinese Characters, a certain unpack them as needed. One lesson on
degree of intelligence is built into the a Chinese character in our system takes
system. A heuristic is designed for up about 20KB on disk. Using data
each game. Provided with the available compression, the size is cut down to
information, the heuristics attempt to half, i.e. 10KB. Again, this slows down
make the best move by inference. In the file access time since data have to
addition, factual data are maintained. be expanded upon retrieval.

Figure 3 File Compression

Communications of COLIPS - an international journal of the Chinese and Oriental Languages
Processing Society, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1993, pp. 31-44.
Conclusion 3. .
At present, the development of .
the "Han" package is tentatively , ,
completed. Preliminary trials with 1982 103-121.
primary school children show that the 4. 1000 .
integration of animation, graphics and , , 1992.
sound makes learning Chinese 5. .
characters much more stimulating and , ,
interesting, especially for junior pupils. 1989.
Majority of the pupils obtained much 6. Turbo C Version 2.0 (User's
higher learning efficiencies in Guide, Reference Guide,
comparison with the traditional way of Additions & Enhancements).
learning Chinese characters by Borland International, Inc.,
dictation. Other participants also gave California, U.S.A., 1988.
encouraging feedbacks. This further 7. George Sutty and Steve Blair.
affirms the value of our research. Advanced Programmer's Guide
To The EGA / VGA. Brady, New
In the next stage, we are going York, U.S.A., 1988.
to further expand the set of characters 8. Image 72 Version 4.2 (User's
for learning. The character set should Manual). A-Four Tech Co., Ltd.,
also be easily replaceable so that the 1990.
system can be adapted to the needs of 9. 3.0 .
different users; for example, using , ,
traditional characters or simplified 1992.
characters. We also intend to put the 10. Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann and
software to use in more primary Daniel Thalmann. Computer
schools and evaluate the software Animation Theory and Practice.
pragmatically for future improvement. Springer-Verlag, Tokyo, Japan,
1985.
11. DOS and BIOS Functions Quick
References Reference. Que Corporation,
1. . Carmel, Indiana, 1988.
12. AD DA Converter DT-2841.
. Data Translation.
, (1978),
5-17.
2. . .
, 1982.
Communications of COLIPS - an international journal of the Chinese and Oriental Languages Processing Society, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1993, pp. 31-44.

Figure 4 Words from Authors Figure 5 Table of Contents

Figure 6 Chinese Characters Figure 7 Examples of Chinese Characters

Communications of COLIPS - an international journal of the Chinese and Oriental Languages Processing Society, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1993, pp. 31-44.

Figure 8 Origin (a) Figure 8 Origin (d)

Figure 9 Stroke Sequence

Figure 8 Origin (b) Figure 8 Origin (e)

Figure 8 Origin (c) Figure 8 Origin (f)

Figure 10 Pronunciation
Communications of COLIPS - an international journal of the Chinese and Oriental Languages Processing Society, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1993, pp. 31-44.

Figure 11 the Related Figure 12 Fishing

Figure 13 Pairing Up Figure 14 Substitute

Communications of COLIPS - an international journal of the Chinese and Oriental Languages Processing Society, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1993, pp. 31-44.

Figure 15 Rules of the Game Figure 16 Dictionary

Figure 17 Help (Table of Contents) ( ) Figure 18 Help (Stroke Sequence) ( )

Communications of COLIPS - an international journal of the Chinese and Oriental Languages
Processing Society, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1993, pp. 31-44.

Appendix i (the 42 lessons)

1 2
3 4
5 6
7 8
9 10
11 12
13 14
15 16
17 18
19 20
21 22
23 24
25 26
27 28
29 30
31 32
33 34
35 36
37 38
39 40
41 42