A Mobile Environment for Chinese Language Learning

Chinese language was usually considered difficult to learn, because of its complicated shape, different pronunciations and multiple meanings. In recent years, the amount of female spouses from Southeast Asia increased rapidly in Taiwan. To acquaint them with local society, some institutions were asked to give Chinese courses regularly. There have been some researches showed that using mobile devices in the course can improve learners’ performance and arouse their motivation. Compare to traditional desktops, mobile devices possess several merits1) mobility, 2) instant feedback, 3) interactivity, 4) context awareness. According to our requirements, a mobile environment can make communication between teacher, learner, system and user’s surrounding. The main contribution of this paper is to propose a mobile environment on PDA for foreigners to learn Chinese. Besides technologic aspect, the investigation into human-computer interaction (HCI) will be stressed through whole design process.