JSQ, LLC

LianXiShuZi ("Practice Numbers") is now available on the iTunes App Store.  LianXiShuZi helps you practice reading, writing, and listening to Chinese numbers.  You can find more information by following the LianXiShuZi link.

While I wait on LianXiShuZi to be approved and continue developing another learning application, I thought I'd take some time to make some improvements to DianHua Dictionary.  Today I experimented with limiting search results to exact matches to see what the performance difference might be.  Most searches are at least twice as fast so this feature will make it into the next version of DianHua Dictionary.  In cases where an exact search doesn't yield the desired results, you can activate the normal exhaustive search using the "More..." item at the end of the list of results.

Where this feature pays off the most is in searches for traditional or simplified characters.  Instead of an exact match in that case, I allowed 2 character results to be displayed when only one character is included in the search term.  The speed improvements are more dramatic than English and Pinyin searches, and the results are more useful.

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. 

There have been a few notes in the reviews on the App Store about search times in DianHua Dictionary.  One review noted that a search for "Football" and even "American Football" took far too long.  On the recently released v1.3.2, a search for "football" on my 1st generation iPhone took just a little over 1 second.  A search for "American Football" was nearly immediate.  Using a previous version, it would not surprise me in the least to see the same search take 3-5 seconds for "Football" and considerably longer for "American Football".  The main point is that I'm constantly working on improving performance. 

The interesting thing I discovered in developing v1.3.2 is that there is a distinct difference between achieving a performance gain in a test environment versus what happens in the native iPhone environment.  To further explain, I changed the English and Pinyin indexing along with the search queries for v1.3.2.  In testing those changes on my development Mac, I achieved dramatic performance improvements on most queries, registering gains in the 70-80% range on many of my tests.  When I tested the new indexing and queries on an iPod touch, the improvements were much less pronounced.  By some crude measurements, the gains were little better than 10-20% in most cases.

The other issues at work in further performance improvements is that there is always a trade-off.  It probably hasn't gone unnoticed that each release of DianHua Dictionary has nearly doubled in size.  The more I do to index and arrange the data to increase search speed, the more space that data will consume.

As for v1.3.2, here are some hints for improving search speed:

1. If you are searching for a verb in English, search for the infinitive.  So instead of searching for "eat", search for "to eat".  This will help the query hit on an exact match instead of a near match.
2. In general, the more information you provide, the faster the search will run.  This is especially important with Pinyin.  Instead of searching for "hao3", you would be better off searching for "ni3 hao3" or "hen3 hao3".
3. If you are searching in Pinyin, include the tone numbers.  The Pinyin data is not indexed well for toneless searching, and the searches will take almost double the amount of time as they would if they included tones.
4. Simplified and Traditional character searches are slow, but the more characters you provide, the faster they will run.

I'm still considering switching the default search results to an exact match on all searches, but I'm hesitant to do this because I know in my own use I rarely want an exact search.  However, I am open to suggestions.

If you have any criticisms or recommendations for DianHua Dictionary, please feel free to contact me through comments on the blog or support inquiries on the site.