A Chinese character teaching system using structure theory and morphing technology

PLoS One. 2014 Jun 30;9(6):e100987. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0100987. eCollection 2014.

Abstract

This paper proposes a Chinese character teaching system by using the Chinese character structure theory and the 2D contour morphing technology. This system, including the offline phase and the online phase, automatically generates animation for the same Chinese character from different writing stages to intuitively show the evolution of shape and topology in the process of Chinese characters teaching. The offline phase builds the component models database for the same script and the components correspondence database for different scripts. Given two or several different scripts of the same Chinese character, the online phase firstly divides the Chinese characters into components by using the process of Chinese character parsing, and then generates the evolution animation by using the process of Chinese character morphing. Finally, two writing stages of Chinese characters, i.e., seal script and clerical script, are used in experiment to show the ability of the system. The result of the user experience study shows that the system can successfully guide students to improve the learning of Chinese characters. And the users agree that the system is interesting and can motivate them to learn.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Asian People
  • Computer-Assisted Instruction / methods*
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Language*
  • Male
  • Motivation
  • Multimedia
  • Pattern Recognition, Visual / physiology*
  • Semantics
  • Students

Grants and funding

This work is supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61170186) and the National Key Technology Research and Development Program of China(Grant No. 2014BAK18B01). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.