An extendible software for learning to write Chinese characters in correct stroke sequences on smartphones

Abstract

With the fast economic development in China, learning to understand Chinese becomes very crucial and popular worldwide. To most foreigners and even native Chinese students, one of the major challenges in learning Chinese is to write Chinese characters in correct stroke sequences since the correct stroke sequences of writing any Chinese character is regarded as crucial in the Chinese culture. Intrinsically, there were very few available character recognition techniques that can tackle the complexity of structures of Chinese characters together with their stroke sequences. In this paper, we propose an extendible and intelligent e-learning software based on learning objects to facilitate the learning of writing Chinese characters in correct stroke sequences. To demonstrate the feasibility of our proposal, a prototype of our proposed e-learning software was built on smartphones. Our proposal represents the first attempt to reduce the complexity while increasing the extendibility of the e-learning software to learn Chinese through learning objects. More importantly, it opens up numerous opportunities for further investigations. © 2011 IEEE.