Character Trading Card Game

[li3wei1]

Surely what does or does not go on the card depends on what it's going to be used for: learning, gaming, or trading. All the arguments so far have been about learning, and we can all make our own flashcards for that anyway. First, figure out how to play the game, or what is going to get people interested in trading and collecting cards, then you'll know what to put on them.

[mouse]

I agree with li3wei1. It's difficult to offer suggestions when what these cards will be used for has not yet been established. Decisions about what features to use should come from needs of the users.

[ParkeNYU]

@Hofmann, are there greater fontal differences within 楷體 (i.e. not cursive or seal)? Could you give me some recommendations?

 

@imron, Mike Campbell didn't raise any concerns about it, so perhaps he assumed that it was predominantly for local use. In fact, perhaps the split should be between 'foreign learner' and 'native user' in terms of making two series of cards. As for the pinyin VS zhuyin issue, this card project, in addition to promoting character education, serves as one of my many schemes to desperately promote a waning format. If I were to provide both options, then the majority of users would surely ignore the zhuyin altogether in favour of the more familiar western-friendly option. I want to create an environment wherein ignoring zhuyin is not an option.

 

@li3wei1, @mouse, I envision that this game could function similarly to Scrabble. One could use radical and component cards to assemble new characters, and more commonly, use character cards of all types to assemble compounds and words. The rarer the constructed character or assembled word, the more points the user will gain. And of course, the more characters and words, the more points, so that both quantity and quality are taken into account. These characters and words would then have to be correctly pronounced upon playing or submitting them, and in some cases, an English definition would also have to be provided.

[wibr]

@ParkeNYU The gameplay you describe actually sounds a lot like my app which I recently posted about here. So far I didn't get any feedback, though. During the creation I spent a lot of time thinking about this stuff, my original idea was also a version with real, 3d printed characters. I moved away from this pretty quickly though. I also spent some time thinking about expanding the concept to words. The problem in using this for gameplay is that you have to handle a lot of things that you can't influence. For example, some components are very very common, like 木 and 亻, so e.g. in my app you can play 休 quite often. I have a mechanism to ban this combination for a number of games at least, but that's not possible with real cards. What I am trying to say is that adding gamification to a system that already has it's own rules is difficult.

[ParkeNYU]

@wibr, I agree, so a randomising element would have to be introduced, and also a way to limit the supply of common components.

[ParkeNYU]

I have made a foreigner/mainland-friendly version of the cards based on all of your input. The only thing that I can't reasonably provide is labeled strokes for the traditional characters, but at least I made them noticeably larger.

 

[Hofmann]

For example, 最, 著, 萬.

[wibr]

For gameplay, I would consider starting out with some existing games (try some and see what could fit) and then trying to integrate characters into it rather than starting out with characters and then trying to figure some gameplay. This would ensure that the game is fun to play. Obviously the player should somehow get a benefit for knowing words and characters, as a motivation to learn them.

 

One idea I once had (for creating mnemonics) is to create four different colors/lands for the four tones, like in Magic the Gathering, which have their own properties. E.g. second tone could be red for fire, with different kinds of monsters and moves. Not sure how to transfer this concept to character cards, probably depends on how close you want to keep the gameplay to characters. The tones are not equally distributed among characters, but as far as I remember the difference is not too large.

[mouse]

 

 

As for the pinyin VS zhuyin issue, this card project, in addition to promoting character education, serves as one of my many schemes to desperately promote a waning format. If I were to provide both options, then the majority of users would surely ignore the zhuyin altogether in favour of the more familiar western-friendly option. I want to create an environment wherein ignoring zhuyin is not an option.

 

Frankly I see this insistence as eccentric in a world where IPA exists.

[Shelley]

serves as one of my many schemes to desperately promote a waning format

 

"waning format" Does this not tell you something?

 

As to using IPA that is one step too far for the ordinary language learner in my opinion.

 

Pinyin works, yes it has its foibles, but it is useable and so many learning resources use pinyin that its almost impossible to get away from it.

 

I like the new design for the cards. Have you got a reason for the colours? different colours for tones? or grammatical use? Its nice to have these visual aides.

[mouse]

 

 

As to using IPA that is one step too far for the ordinary language learner in my opinion.

 

Certainly, but if pinyin is being discarded in favour of zhuyin because zhuyin is better and doesn't take much time to learn, then you may as well learn IPA.

[Shelley]

Certainly, but if pinyin is being discarded in favour of zhuyin because zhuyin is better and doesn't take much time to learn, then you may as well learn IPA.

 

Yes, fair enough.

 

If I had been shown IPA before pinyin I might also reject pinyin, but I don't want to learn another method at my stage, for me pinyin or any of the others is merely a stepping stone to just using characters.

[ParkeNYU]

@mouse, IPA would not work because it is a phonetic script, whilst Pinyin and Zhuyin are phonemic scripts. IPA is highly specific (unless you mean Broad IPA, which is still specific), and does not allow for any variation in accent or phoneme realisation. The other problem is that IPA completely masks the beauty and utility of Mandarin's phonological symmetry and phoneme distribution.

 

@Shelley, there are three colours: one for simple picto-ideographs, one for semantic compounds, and one for semantic-phonetic compounds (I've halved the six traditional character categories, as other scholars have done in the previous century). Also, Zhuyin is waning because the mainland has become far more culturally and economically relevant than Taiwan since the 1980s, not because of any intrinsic shortcoming of the script.