Language Software

Computer programs that help students learn languages bear a distinctive Dartmouth stamp. A prime example: Hanzi Assistant, which began as a system of electronic "flashcards" to teach the writing of Chinese characters, or banzi, to beginning and intermediate-level students. The idea emerged from work-shops that Apple Computer sponsored with Dartmouth faculty when the program-writing software HyperCard was introduced in 1987. Asian Studies faculty members Susan Blader and Hua-yuan Mowry provided the academic input. Result: Dartmouth's first CD-ROM. Students at more than 50 institutions worldwide now use Hanzi Assistant to help them write and pronounce Chinese. The CD-ROM contains a database of the 2,500 characters of the Chinese basic literacy set. Students see and hear each character represented in multiple forms: the character as written with traditional brush and pen; the character animated as written with ball-point pen or pencil in the proper stroke order; pronunciation by male and female native speakers; the pinyin, or phonetic representation in Roman letters; and a translation.

A more recent development in software for foreign-language instruction is annotext, a program designed to ease the task of reading text in another language. When a student selects any word in a poem in, say, Greek, appearing on the Macintosh screen, another window appears containing the word, its meaning in English, and grammatical information such as its part of speech. The prof can make available other enrichments to the text, such as another document containing the translation, a sound file containing a reading of the text, or connections to related images on a laser disk. Released in the spring of 1993, annotext is already used at more than 30 colleges nationwide.