Klaus Thul

Introduction video

The following video is based on an older version of KTdict (some features are still missing), but I believe it is still useful to understand the principles of KTdict and the flashcard trainer

Manual

The following is the manual of KTdict, as it also included within the application.

General

You can search using Chinese characters (traditional or simplified), English or Hanyu Pinyin. The type of input will be automatically detected. KTdict C-E searches while you are typing, but only when at least two characters are entered. To search for a single character, press the search button in the keyboard.

It is possible to mix Pinyin and Chinese characters in a search – for example you can search for “朋友”, “peng友” or “peng2you”. If you put a center dot (•) between two words or syllables, KTdict will search for the individual components. E. g. “朋•友” will search for “朋” and “友” individually.

Tapping on an item in the result list reveals a detailed view. If you tap on an English meaning or a Pinyin pronunciation in the detailed view, you can copy it to the clipboard or use it to start a new search, which is helpful to find more words with the same English meaning or same pronunciation.

Tapping on a Chinese word in the detailed view displays the individual characters in a larger view. From there, you can select a single character or the complete word to search for it or to copy it to the clipboard.

Search tips

Diacritic marks are ignored. For example, ä / a and é / e are considered the same. You can enter “Frederic Chopin” to find “Frédéric Chopin”.

Pinyin tones can be entered as a number after the syllable (“ma3″). If the number is zero or omitted, the input will match any tone. To explicitly search for syllables in neutral tone enter a five (“ma5″).

Some input can be understood as English and Pinyin (for example “you” is an English word as well as a Pinyin syllable). In this case, first all English results will be shown followed by Pinyin results. To search only for Pinyin, enter a tone number after the syllable (e. g. “you0″).

Pinyin “ü” can be entered as “ü” (by holding the u-key), “v” or “u:”.

KTdict tries to automatically separate the input into pinyin syllables (e. g. “pengyou” will be interpreted as “peng you”). But this works only if the separation is unique. For example “xian” is interpreted as one single sillable. If you intend to search for “xi an”, you need to separate the syllables with a space or tone marker.

Chinese input

To be able to write Chinese characters, you have to activate the Chinese handwriting input of the device. It can be done using: Home screen » Settings » International » Keyboards » Chinese » switch “Handwriting” to on.

After this is done, there is a little globe left to the space bar in the virtual keyboard which let you switch between e. g. English and Chinese
handwritten input.

Trainer: Principle

The flashcard trainer allows you to practice and learn vocabulary. Its functionality is based on the learning system devised by Sebastian Leitner.

The flashcard file has six boxes:

• Box 0 contains cards you have never been tested with. New cards are normally placed into this box.
• Box 1 contains cards you did not remember the last time you have been tested. Independent of the current box, a card will be moved into box 1 if it isn’t remembered.
• Box 2 contains cards which have been once remembered successfully.
• Box 3 contains cards which have been twice (in a row) remembered successfully.
• Box 4 contains cards which have been three times remembered successfully.
• Box 5 contains cards which have been four times remembered successfully.

Learning is done using daily lessons. You can choose the size of the daily lesson based on your available time. The cards for the daily lessons are chosen from the boxes of the flashcard trainer, usually taking most of the cards from box 1, but less and less cards from box 2 to 5. This way, difficult words will be trained more often.

The flashcard trainer can quiz a vocabulary card using Chinese, Pinyin or English as front-side. You can define for each card if all three or only some of these front-sides shall be quizzed. If more then one front-side are quizzed during a daily lesson, a card is only considered to be remembered if all three front-sides have been answered right.

Each vocabulary card in the flashcard trainer belongs to one group. Initially, there is only one “default” group, but you can add your own. This allows you to split flashcards e. g. by lesson of a textbook. Depending on your study needs, you can include only cards from selected groups into a daily training set.

Trainer: Adding cards

There are three ways to add cards to the flashcard trainer:

• Selecting the button “+Trainer” in the detailed view of the dictionary. The word is then copied from the dictionary into the flashcard trainer.
• Selecting the “+”-button in the flashcard trainer or in the flashcard list. This allows manual entry of a flashcard.
• Importing flashcards from .csv files. This is described in detail in a separate section of the help.

In the first two cases, an editor appears which lets you modify the content of the flashcard. You can enter or modify the English meaning(s), traditional and simplified Chinese, Pinyin, the box-number, the quiz settings (which frontsides are used during training) as well as the group of the flashcard.

Trainer: Import/export

Flashcards can be imported and exported via both Email and iTunes. This function is only available on devices running iOS 3.2 or later, with exception of export via Email.

Export via Email

To export flashcards via Email, open up the flashcard list display on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. If you want to export only a part of your flashcards, use the group or search functions to select what you want to export. Tap on the button “export” and select “send by Email”. A form will appear which allows you to send an Email containing the flashcards as an attachment.

The file format is .csv which can be opened with a text editor or standard spreadsheet software. In the settings, it is possible to change encoding, column separation as well as usage of quotation marks.

Import via Email

Go into the Email application of your device and open an Email with a .csv-file as an attachment. Tap and hold onto the attachment. After a few moments, a box will appear which lets you select an application to open the .csv file. When you select KTdict, KTdict will open a dialog box to import flashcards from this .csv-file.

Export via iTunes

Follow the same steps as for export via Email, but select “copy to document folder”. This will store a .csv file into the applications document folder using current date and time as filename.

To access this file, connect your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch to iTunes on your computer. In iTunes, first select the device in the list on the left and then select “apps”. Under “File sharing”, select KTdict. You will now see a list of all .csv exported from KTdict. You can drag-and-drop the files out of iTunes into a folder on your computer.

Import via iTunes

To import flashcards via iTunes, you have to add them as a .csv-file to the documents folder of KTdict in iTunes.

After you have done this, open KTdict on your device, go to the flashcard list display and tap the “import” button. You will then be presented a list of files available in the documents folder for import. Tap on the desired file to continue with the import.

The import dialog

After you selected a file for import either from the document folder or an Email, the file import dialog appears. It allows you to make the following adjustments.

File format:

You can select the character encoding, the column separator and if quotation marks are used to enclose fields. KTdict tries to guess these settings from the file, which should work for most cases.

Columns for import:

You can select which columns from the .csv to import and how to interpret them in KTdict. If the column headers in the file match those used by KTdict, this will be automatically filled out. Otherwise, you need to individually assign each column.

Group assignement:

To decide which group the new flashcards shall be assigned to. In case the .csv-file contains a group column, it is possible to assign each group in the .csv-file to the the same or a different group group on the device.

External

Sometimes it is useful to search for a word on the Internet. To speed this up, KTdict has an integrated web-browser with links to popular Internet-sources like Wikepedia or Google.

There are two ways to use this feature:

• Tap on “external” in the main search view. This will open the external search function with the content of the search field as input.
• Tap first on an English word in the detailed view or on “select character” or “select word” in the large Chinese character view, then on “external”. This will open the external search with the selected English / Chinese character / Chinese word.

In the external view, you will be presented with a list of internet sources. Tap on an item in the list to open the content of the search field in the corresponding internet source.

If you have the Dictionary.com application installed, you will also see it as one choice in the list. Tapping it will open the Dictionary.com application with the search field as input.

Credits

KTdict C-E contains the dictionary data of CC-CEDICT, which are used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

To speed-up searching, the data are converted into a binary format. The resulting data files are available at http://www.klausthul.com.

Search technology and user interface © Klaus Thul, 2008-2011.

Please send feedback, bug reports or suggestions to ktdict@me.com.