Sinographs: Studying Chinese characters through Adobe flash on Apple iPhone

Abstract

Sinographs are Chinese characters used in the Chinese and Japanese languages. People who are learning Chinese and sinographs challenging to memorize. My objective is to teach 50 of the most-used simplified sinographs to Chinese learners and to help them determine how to form basic characters through an interactive application developed in Flash Professional for utilization on the iPhone and as on a demo webpage. Interactive applications appear to becoming increasingly more popular, especially in web design and for other devices, so I utilized my experience in Flash Professional (and ActionScript 3) and graphic user interface (GUI) to create this application. I used a qualitative method by giving users a questionnaire and collecting their feedback on the application's usability. I then distributed or shared the application on various social networking sites, i.e. Facebook and Twitter.

The interactive application contains sinographs, ancient seals (ancient Chinese characters), traditional characters and English meanings. It is in flashcard form. And, finally, a quiz (in drag & drop puzzle form) is provided to test users' knowledge of sinographs after they learn or memorize the assigned characters. Users have to combine pieces to form sinographs to match the English meaning.