Released back in November 2008 but only recently approved, the ChinesePod iPhone application has to be a contender for the App Store award for the longest review period. It has been such a long time coming that many in the ChinesePod community had given up any hope of seeing it’s arrival.
So, when news of it’s approval was announced over on the ChinesePod Blog I headed straight for the App Store. I’ve only had a couple of hours to play with it, but the Quick Review (iTunes link) application shows signs of great promise. However, it isn’t perfect and, as such, probably won’t make it onto that all important Home screen on my iPhone.
The main features of the ChinesePod Quick Review application include:
- A Chinese/English dictionary
- A database of interlinked sample sentences
- Flashcard review
The ChinesePod Quick Review iPhone application is over 10Mb in size and so you need to download it over a WiFi connection. The App crashed when I first launched it, but I blame that on my phone rather than the App itself. The iPhone needs rebooting occasionally and a simple reboot had the App running fine.
I tested the application on my way back from work allowing me to try the application in a wide variety of connectivity options. The ChinesePod dictionary works offline and it is surprisingly fast. The wealth of meanings for a particular word doesn’t match some of the other dictionaries available for the iPhone but for the beginners out there this can be a benefit. The word returned is more often than not the meaning you are looking for.
By far and away the most useful feature of the ChinesePod iPhone application is the provision of sample sentences for each of the words. These sentences are all interlinked and it is surprisingly addictive to be able to browse through a language through a web of interconnected sentences. I really like this feature and spent quite some time playing with it. It wasn’t long though before cracks started to appear. There are some bugs that can be quite frustrating at times. If you loose network connectivity the App sometimes says there are no sample sentences when in reality there is just no network connectivity. In some of the sentences, not all the characters are translated. I’m not sure why this is as many of the characters are themselves in the dictionary. I’m sure these bugs get will get ironed out soon but let’s hope that Apple approves any updates reasonably quickly.
The flashcard utility was the most disappointing part of the application. It doesn’t have any way to mark flashcard as studied and the options to cycle through the cards are somewhat limited. I’ve been spoiled by Anki when it comes to flashcards and I guess that I’m being a little bit harsh by comparing ChinesePod Quick Review to Anki. What frustrated me most though was despite several reboots of the iPhone, the flashcard utility crashed all to frequently to be useful. You need to be a ChinesePod subscriber to use this feature (the App itself is free after all), but don’t worry if you aren’t signed up, you aren’t missing much.
The ChinesePod Application is really two applications in one. I like the dictionary and positively love the sample sentences and can see this being a really useful addition to my Chinese Learning arsenal. The flashcard utility however still needs a little work before I adopt it as my vocabulary review tool of choice. What is most encouraging though, is that after many of us had given up hope of ever seeing it the ChinesePod Quick Review application is here (iTunes link) and it shows signs of great promise. What did you like or dislike about the application? What killer feature would you add to make this the perfect Chinese study application for the iPhone?
I bet they had to go through and translate all the Chinese because you wouldn’t want a bad word to slip in… ;0
Thanks for the review, Bill! Your feedback is really appreciated. You’re absolutely right that SRS needs to be integrated, and of course, no good app should ever crash.
Joe is right… one of the holdups (only one in a long list) is that every single bad word had to be removed from the dictionary before it could be approved.
Haha could be the most likely explanation. Must have been a frustrating wait for the programmers.
Thanks for the App John. I, and I’m sure many others, appreciate it. Great work. I cannot believe that Apple is reviewing all dictionary entries. The whole App review process needs an overhaul. Just by way of an update, the ChinesePod App now does occupy a spot on my Home screen. Can do without Skype now that I’m back in the UK.
With regards the crashes, all iPhone Apps seem to cash at some point, even those developed by Apple. The best solution I’ve found seems to be giving the phone a reboot every now and again (memory problem?). Not sure if that will help with the debugging.