Tentatively named LianXiShu, my new application helps you practice Chinese numbers. As most any beginning Chinese student knows, Chinese numbers are fairly straightforward. There are no special numbers between 0 and 100. You simply combine 1-10 to make all of the other numbers. Unfortunately, it's not so simple when you pass 100. There are extra 0's and the major divisions do not fall at each multiple of 10. The purpose of LianXiShu is to help you go from the point of understanding Chinese numbers to knowing them as well as you do English numbers.
As a native English speaker when you hear "eleven thousand one hundred ten", it's easy to visualize the number "11,110". Now what if you hear "yi wan yi qian yi bai yi shi"? Going further, what if you read "一万一千一百一十"? Or, what if you want to type the number "112"? LianXiShu is built to help you make "十" as recognizable as "10".
Reading Practice shows you the simplified characters for a number, and you have to type in the numeric equivalent.
Writing Practice is the reverse of reading. LianXiShu gives you a number and requires you to enter the Simplified Characters for the number. With the iPhone's keyboards, you have the choice of doing this by drawing characters or by entering the pinyin and selecting characters from the popup.
Finally, Listening Practice provides audio of a native Chinese speaker for the numbers 0-100. After 100, LianXiShu combines numbers to build numbers up to over 2 billion. The cadence and a few of the tones on these numbers aren't perfect (yi changes tones depending on the subsequent tone), but it's still good practice at understanding bigger numbers. Listening practice can also act as a quick conversion tool as it will show you Simplified Characters as you type in your answer.
Each of the 3 interfaces sports its own range so that you can limit your practice to what you want to learn.
If you are interested in helping test this learning application or another we have on the way, please register on the site and drop me an e-mail with your iPhone or iPod touch device ID.
