The Duwen Chinese Literacy Trainer app from Clavis Sinica is designed to help students at every level improve their Chinese language reading skills in an engaging and systematic way. It enables users to overcome some of the major barriers to building Chinese literacy outside a classroom setting: finding texts at the appropriate level for reading practice, developing reading fluency, and measuring progress over time.
The app, which runs on all iOS devices, offers a fully integrated set of tools for assessing and improving Chinese language reading skills:
1. Chinese Literacy Assessment Test helps you estimate the number of characters you currently know, so you can select readings at an appropriate level and measure your progress over time.
2. Audiotext Library allows you to select and download short, curated Chinese language readings precisely calibrated to your current literacy level, as measured by the assessment test. The apps library currently includes over 50 audiotexts on a variety of topics, and more are added every day.
3. Audiotext Reader helps you practice reading your selected texts by playing natural voice audio recordings of individual sentences and phrases and providing instant dictionary look-up of characters and words you dont know. Youll find that working regularly with the reader rapidly improves your listening and reading comprehension skills while building up your vocabulary.
4. Analytical Dictionary invites you to explore the composition and usage of individual characters in a text, so that you can learn them in association with other related words and characters you already know.
5. Flashcards Tool automatically creates flashcards lists based on the vocabulary you look up during your reading sessions, and then allows you to review these new vocabulary items using a multiple-choice testing exercise.