The alpha version of the app is live here!
Morph is an app designed to help you learn Chinese by allowing you to translate a word from your native language into Chinese, then decomposing the Chinese word into characters. I find that this is especially useful in learning and remembering semantically "transparent" words like "volcano", which is "火山" in Chinese. The character 火 can be translated as "fire", and 山 as "mountain".
My currently-underdeveloped hypothesis is that words like this are easier to learn and recall when you're taught what their constituent characters mean. Myself and my collaborators are currently developing a study that will assess a related research in question situated in the greater context of Chinese second-language acquisition.
This technique works well with transparent words, but less well with words that are partially opaque (like "grasshopper", which in Chinese is "蚱蜢" - both morphemes can be translated individually as "grasshopper", but never appear by themselves) or entirely opaque (like "radar", which is "雷达", lit. "thunder (reach) up to"). I have some ideas about features that could support the learning of more opaque words, but nothing firm yet. Have an idea? Open an issue! Your feedback is valuable, because I'm a Chinese neophyte.
Morph uses data from related projects (with much gratitude). These include:
- The Chinese Lexical Database: Sun, C. C., Hendrix, P., Ma, J.Q. & Baayen, R. H. (2018). Chinese Lexical Database (CLD): A large-scale lexical database for simplified Mandarin Chinese. Behavior Research Methods, https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-018-1038-3.
- Hanzi DB