Digital flashcards for learning Chinese surnames
Although there are thousands of surnames in Chinese, the names of an overwhelmingly large proportion of the population come from a set of several hundred characters. I created flashcards to help students of Chinese memorize them. In compiling these lists I consulted a number of sources, including two dictionaries published in mainland China, the Jinciba dictionary program, Rick Harbaugh's outstanding site on Chinese language, and a site dedicated to Chinese surnames created by Ronald Eng Young.
I have posted on this page sets of ready-to-load flashcards designed for the Palm-OS freeware flashcard program "Learn?!" by Sebastian Laiblin. Do not be put off by the fact that the title of this program contains not one but two punctuation marks; it is nicely done. The flashcards consist of Chinese characters paired with their pinyin phonetic equivalents, followed by a number denoting the tone.
On ordinary Palm systems, you need to load special software in order to display Chinese. I am quite pleased with Du Yongtao's CJK-OS.
For those who may wish to use these flashcards with different software or on different platforms, I have also included source files. These are in tab-delineated text format, suitable for importing into spreadsheets, for example. You can inspect these files in your browser, but may have to select the appropriate encoding to do so (under "View" in Internet Explorer.)
I would be grateful to receive reports of any errors or significant omissions in these files.
| Simplified Chinese (GuoBiao Encoding) | Traditional Chinese (Big5 Encoding) | |
| Basic set (100 surnames) | flashcards | source | flashcards | source |
| Advanced set (412 surnames) | flashcards | source | flashcards | source |
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