An Intelligent Mobile Application to Facilitate the Exploratory and Personalized Learning of Chinese on Smartphones

There are increasing interests to learn Chinese all over the world due to the fast economic growth of China. Intrinsically, learning Chinese is challenging to most foreigners and Chinese students as well due to the complex structures of Chinese Characters, the writing of characters in correct stroke sequences, and their appropriate usage and pronunciation, etc. Even with the guidance of an experienced Chinese teacher, there is often insufficient time to practise the writing or pronunciation during classes. However, mobile devices such as the Android-based smartphones, iPads or iPhones may open up numerous opportunities facilitated by the latest interface and sensing technologies for students to learn anytime and anywhere. Therefore, we propose here an extendible and intelligent mobile application namely the Intelligent Chinese Explorer (iCExplorer) based on learning objects and fully utilizing the smart sensors including the GPS, touch and image/video sensors of smartphones to facilitate foreigners or Chinese students to learn Chinese more effectively. In particular, we have designed an intelligent algorithm to aid all learners in writing Chinese characters with the correct stroke sequences. To demonstrate the feasibility of our proposal, a prototype of our proposed mobile application was successfully built on the iOS platform for a thorough evaluation with a detailed plan. Furthermore, there are many interesting directions for the future investigations of our proposal.