costs of printing flash cards

[randall_flagg]

hi there!

i'll be going to china for two years in just three short weeks (yipee!!!).

during the last years, i have accumulated about 5,300 flash cards with chinese words on them. i designed all of these flashcards myself and i love them! they have the english word, jiantizi, fantizi, character explanations and 例句。 they are printed on nice and sturdy paper, about two times the size of name cards. so they do take up a lot of room and they are darn heavy. will i be able to take them? i love my flashcards system and i'd loathe to have to find a new learning system for myself.

inspired by a recent post, i was wondering: would it make sense for me to re-print those cards in china? can i get paper like that in china? would that be grossly expensive? 5,300 cards are a lot! any help would be greatly appreciated.

thanks,

randall

[skylee]

If the cards are too heavy and bulky to carry, how about sending them to your address in China by mail?

[randall_flagg]

yeah, i was considering doing that, too. but that'll be expensive and take three months! but perhaps that's what i'll end up doing.

[mr.stinky]

about two weeks airmail, 6-8 weeks parcel post.....if it ever arrives. don't send anything

irreplaceable by surface!!!

airmail is more secure, but how much does this weigh? can't you send cheap via

'media mail' and still go airmail?

how important are the cards? worth 20 bucks or so to go ups/ems?

[randall_flagg]

i'd be willing to pay 20 bucks, if that's all it took. i just weighed my cards: they add up to a whopping 17 pounds....wow! that's a lot more than i thought. guess i'll check out airfaires for that tomorrow.

[peter_5467]

Throw the cards away and buy childrens books instead when you get to china. Seeing the characters in context of a story will help you remember them much better than flash cards will. You can get some simple childrens books and fairy tales that have both chinese characters and pinyin. I found reading these helped much more than studying the same sentences over and over again in the text books.

[roddy]

If he's got 5,300 flashcards, I'm guessing he's way past the childrens books stage . . .

Couple of thoughts. Have you looked at moving over to electronic flashcards - ZDT or Plecodict? You'd have to convert them, but if you have an electronic version already it won't be difficult, and if you don't it shouldn't be too much of a hassle - just time consuming. Or perhaps you could pay someone to do that. Just think about being able to put all 5,300 cards in your pocket and study on the bus . . .

Roddy

PS Ok, only one thought.

[randall_flagg]

Hi Roddy!

Yes, I've thought about using my plecodict flashcard system to do just what you said. But for some odd reason, I get much more done in the same amount of time using the flashcards I have. Also, I think it would take forever and a day to transfer them to the plecodict since I'd have to put them in manually (I do have a digital version, but they are in a Word file, not as a spread sheet or anything but I use one (shrunken) page for one word/character)

And yeah, I think I am somewhat past the children's book stage (this is not saying that I would understand each and every single word in a children's book). And I don't use my flash cards for character recognition, I read newspapers and textbooks for that. I use them to come up with the proper Chinese word when looking at the English word. Also, since I work with example sentences a lot, I come up with a sentence or two when I am revising my characters. That helps put them into context.

Thanks everybody for their help, I'll let you know what I ended up doing as soon as I know myself.

[gato]

Also, I think it would take forever and a day to transfer them to the plecodict since I'd have to put them in manually (I do have a digital version, but they are in a Word file, not as a spread sheet or anything but I use one (shrunken) page for one word/character)

Have you imported flashcard list into PlecoDict before? It's fantastically quick. If you could live with the ABC Dictionary definitions, you can get into a PlecoDict-compatible UTF-8 format within 10 minutes. All you need are the Chinese characters; your own definitons can be truncated.

[in_lab]

You might also consider Supermemo. With supermemo you can import the cards from a text file. I know you don't have them formatted for that, but if your formatting is consistent, it wouldn't be too hard to convert them. If you posted the file here, I or someone else could convert them for you.