nciku users with iPhones or iPod touches might be interested in a flashcard application we put together to help you memorise Chinese vocabulary. If you go to http://tinyurl.com/ncikuiphone on your phone you can choose from any of nciku’s 126 theme words lists and work your way through Chinese-English or English-Chinese flashcards of the words on that list, with pinyin and images.
Just point the web browser on your iPhone or iPod Touch to http://tinyurl.com/ncikuiphone, choose a vocab list and start studying. Tap the screen to see the pinyin, translation or move to the next card, or the “Remove This Card” link to take that word out of the session.
This is a web-based app, not something you have to download from iTunes, and like the rest of nciku it’s totally free. We’d love to hear everyone’s opinions and suggestions about this project, or anything else you might want to see from nciku.
This also seems like a good time to remind people of the nciku Mobile Chinese Dictionary (http://m.nciku.com) that we launched in the middle of last year. It’s a slimmed-down version of our nciku dictionary content designed to be used on any internet-connected mobile phone, so even if you can’t make use of our iPhone flashcards you can use your phone to look up Chinese words on the go.
Update: Some changes in iPhone OS 3.0 mean that these flashcards don’t work properly for people who have an iPhone 3GS or who have upgraded to the new OS. If you haven’t updated your OS, it should still work fine as before. We’re working on fixing it - thanks for your patience.
10 responses so far ↓
1 Sally
Mar 30, 2009 at 5:12 pm
oh it’s REALLY cool!!
2 divya
Mar 31, 2009 at 10:09 pm
why dont you add something like this for blackberry users?
3 michelle
Apr 13, 2009 at 9:53 pm
would be nice if we could use our own wordlists from that flashcard app!
4 Kevin
Apr 14, 2009 at 9:54 am
@divya: Thanks for the suggestion - I don’t think any of us have a Blackberry, but there seem to be some emulators you can download from RIM’s site so we can look into it.
@michelle: We’re already working on a flashcard system that uses user vocab lists - we’ll launch a version for desktop browsers first, but making an iPhone version is the next step after that.
5 torbjorn
Apr 15, 2009 at 1:40 pm
Would be even nicer to have it as an application. I’m almost never conected to internet but often have some spare time to look for words in my Touch.
6 Fergus
Apr 23, 2009 at 10:53 am
This is really cool. Well done!
It would be so much better if it were a downloadable iPhone app though. Have you got one in the works?
7 Leslie
Apr 27, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Another option for flashcards on your iphone is the iFlipr app. I downloaded it several months ago and every time I get a new set of vocab words I create a new “deck” on www.iflipr.com, then I “share” it, then I search for it on my iphone and download it.
It’s nice because I can create my own flashcard deck and also the logic built into the system is nice. When I miss a word it repeats it several cards later and even when I get that one right it still repeats it more often.
8 Axel
Jul 24, 2009 at 10:12 pm
Thanks a lot for this application!
However, I think it could be way better if you added the possibility to hear prononciation for each word on iphone (same for the whole website because flash doesn’t work on iphone). I wait this kind of improvement with impatience
9 mengzi
Dec 2, 2009 at 8:27 pm
There are a whole bunch of great apps for Chinese learners. I’ve found the Qingwen Dictionary to be excellent. For flashcards I’d love to see NCIKU make this an actual app but in the meantime I think Panda Chinese Flashcards is the best flashcard app. (BTW, if anyone is a developer there seems to be a real absence of stroke order/character writing apps. )
10 Charlie
Feb 8, 2010 at 8:20 pm
Really cool! I hope you guys release a Nciku iPhone app before long!
Leave a Comment