Learning to write Chinese characters with correct stroke sequences on mobile devices

Abstract

The learning of Chinese has become very important and popular all over the world. For most Chinese or foreigners, the most difficult part is to write Chinese characters with correct stroke sequences due to the complicated structures and diversity of Chinese characters. In this paper, we propose a ubiquitous and intelligent learning platform for students to learn to write Chinese characters with correct stroke sequences on mobile devices. Our e-Iearning platform will systematically categorize all the Chinese characters into four basic structures. In each training session run on any ultra-mobile PC, a student will be exposed to 20 or more characters involving all these four basic structures progressing from the easiest to the most difficult level. After writing a Chinese character, a student can check whether the stroke sequences are correct or not. In addition, the student can request to play an animation to show the correct stroke sequences of writing the concerned character. To demonstrate the feasibility, we built a prototype of the smart e-Iearning platform for empirical evaluation. Being heuristic based, our e-Iearning system is adaptive and extensible, thus flexibly providing more characters with relevant structures for the student to practise in the future development. All in all, our work sheds light on many interesting directions for further exploration. © 2010 IEEE.