- Announcements and Release Notes

Arch Chinese is driven by the Chinese learning commmunity. We add new features and improve the existing functionalities constantly to meet the needs of the Chinese language learners. Major changes are listed on this page for your reference. Follow Arch Chinese on Twitter for minor updates and announcements.

February 3, 2010	Per a Chinese teacher's request, added a new Worksheet option: Show its radical along with the character. Chinese Teachers can turn it off if the students are confused by the radicals
January 22, 2010	Released the first batch of Chinese character etymologies for simplified Chinese characters. The etymology information is located right above the character decomposition explorer. e.g 中 Now, with a single click, the system can generate worksheets for more than 100 characters at a time. This feature is handy for Chinese language teachers and Chinese learners who are preparing HSK tests Added a new Loadn'Go flow on Worksheets page to load a Chinese text file and immediately generate worksheets for the Chinese characters in the file
December 28, 2009	Added Mandarin Tone Drill to test and practice your knowledge of Mandarin Pinyin and tones. Improved Searching Chinese characters by components or radicals
November 08, 2009	Now you can export character stroke sequences to JPEG or PNG images. The "Export" button is next to the "Print" button on the toolbar. Added the long-waited English meaning and Pinyin customization for individual characters on the Chinese character worksheets. The customizations apply to the character animations as well. Check it out by clicking the Customizing button on the up-right corner of the animated character. As requested, the Chinese Phrase Handout Generator now allows the user to import and export the handouts. Since the handouts are stored on your local machine, this feature is useful for users who want to share or print handouts on mulitple computers. Fixed a worksheet/handout generation bug in Linux environment. Added the simplifed character on the left side of the animated character. It is handy to copy the character to the worksheet box
October 24, 2009	Chinese phrase handout generator now is a hybrid of Chinese character worksheet generator and Chinese phrase worksheet generator. You can generate a worksheet where you can start tracing the characters and write the phrases made of the characters you trace. Added traditional Chinese character support for Chinese character/phrase handout generator.
October 09, 2009	On the Chinese character worksheets, instead of using a different color, now the radicals are placed on the side of the head characters.
September 27, 2009	Added worksheet page orientation setting. Now you can generate handwriting worksheets with landscape page orientation. In Chinese phrase handout generator, the Pinyin now becomes optional On the Chinese character worksheets, if Create Pinyin practice grid for each character is enabled, Pinyin will be shown on top of the first tracing character.
September 16, 2009	Instead of using tone numbers, now the Pinyin on the generated Chinese worksheets and handouts use tone marks. When you create a Chinese phrase handout, for your convenience, you enter Pinyin with tone numbers, but the system will automatically convert them to tone marks when you print them.
September 13, 2009	Instead of using the long serial key to log in, for registered members, now you can create an alternative, easy-to-remember member id via the System and Security tab of the Settings pop-up. Once it is created, you can later log in on that machine using the simple member id. This member id is only for your convenience and it does not replace the assigned member serial key. PLEASE DO NOT USE THIS FEATURE ON PUBLIC COMPUTERS, YOU MAY UNCONSCIOUSLY SHARE YOUR MEMBER ID WITH OTHERS, WHICH IS PROHIBITED BY TERMS OF USE OF THIS SERVICE.
September 5, 2009	Similar to the YouTube videos, now you can use the Character Animation Creator to generate embeddable and interactive character animations. You can integrate the animations into your school or personal web pages. Added a new option, Show character stroke sequences in one box to save space, to the character worksheet generation. By default, this option is disable for the existing users, but is enabled for new users. Here are two sample worksheets, one with Pinyin grids and one without Pinyin grids.
August 30, 2009	As requsted by Chinese language teachers, created a Chinese Handout Generator to allow you to generate customizied phrase and sentence handouts. It is listed under Mandarin Chinese Tools page. As in Chinese Character Worksheets, you can adjust the handout settings before generating them.
August 18, 2009	Added a Show Worksheet Settings link on Worksheets page. Now the users can view and change the worksheet generation options easily before generating the worksheets. On the Worksheet settings page, changed the max blank practice boxes to 15 so that up to 2 lines of blank practice boxes can be generated for each character.
August 8, 2009	Improved Chinese character worksheet generation and removed the horizontal spaces between the character writing boxes. A new Worksheet generation option, Create Pinyin spelling practice grid for each character, has been added to the Settings pop-up. This option allows the users to generate Pinyin writing grids on top of the character writing boxes. (Thanks to Christine Tsai). Users now can use the Delete button on the Imported Character pop-up to clean up imported characters. (Thanks to Christina of MMI Preparatory School).
July 8, 2009	Added "Show me how to write the word" buttons to the example words/phrases of Chinese characters. Added a "Generate Chinese Character Worksheet" button to each example word/phrase.
July 2, 2009	Improved Search by English feature. In addition to the matched characters, the system lists the words and sentences that contain the English word or sentence. Compiled similar-looking Chinese characters that are confusing, undistinguishable to beginners. such as 拨 and 拔, Deployed a few hundreds to the system. More will be deployed once they are reviewed.
May 7, 2009	Now the system highlights the character being read when you listen to the pronunciations of the example words. Try it out by clicking the little speakers at the right end of the example words. Chinese handwriting worksheets are getting even better! We added a new option, worksheet grid color, to allow you to further fine tune the worksheets. In addition, we changed the writing box borders from dashed to solid lines. Added a new grid size option, Tiny, for users who like really small writing boxes. (Thanks to Chris King)
May 1, 2009	Added a "Paste and Print" feature on the Worksheets page to allow Chinese language teachers to generate offline practice worksheets quickly without going through the character animations. Added a few options to the Options page of ArchMemo
April 18, 2009	ReleasedArchMemo (Alpha), an innovative Spaced Repetition System (SRS) to help you learn Chinese efficiently and effectively.
April 12, 2009	Added additional options for writing worksheet generation. In addition to the writing grid styles and sizes, now the user has fine-grained control over number of tracing characters, number of blank writing boxes, tracing character color, new stroke color and written stroke color Fixed a PayPal integration bug. Now, after signing up, the user will receive the member serial key instantly.
March 14, 2009	Added Basic Rules of Chinese Character Stroke Order Added an option to allow the users to print handwriting practice worksheets without character stroke sequences
March 5, 2009	System now remembers configuration settings across sessions. Also, a Reset to Configuration Defaults button is added on the System and Security tab of Settings pop-up. Added Search by Component to the Stroke Order Animation page Fixed a bug in animating a set of characters continuously
March 1, 2009	Added look-up Chinese characters with a given component. On the left side of the animated character, the Component label, along with Radical label and the pronunced text, are hyperlinks. Click them to find charaters that have the same component, radical or pronunciation, respectively.
February 23, 2009	Replaced the look-up by radicals with Chinese Radical Table to help users to locate a character easily and quickly. Pinyin and English meanings are shown as tooltips for the radicals and characters. It also features two-level sorting by stroke count, usage frequency or Pinyin (alphabetically).
February 20, 2009	Added addtional Pinyin syllables to the Standard Mandarin Pinyin Table Added Software and Security configuration tab to the Options pop-up. Now the user can specify how long the system should remember you after you log in. Also,if you want your name to be printed on the footer of the generated character handwriting PDF worksheet, you can tell the system to do so. Based on the user preference, the system now is able to automatically optimize the user interface for best performance or best usability.
February 18, 2009	Integrated stroke order animation with flashcard. Now the user can learn the stroke order/writing as well. Improved the search capability. Now the user can use Chinese characters/phrases, English and Pinyin in one query to search characters, phrases or sentences, For an example, you can search medical universities in Shanghai using query "大学, medical, shang4 hai3" Per a user's request, now the system can remember you for one day after you sign in. So you do not have to sign in again after you leave the Stroke Order Animation or Worksheets pages
February 15, 2009	Added Chinese character decomposition explorer On the Mandarin Pinyin Table, the users now can view the Chinese characters for each variation of a syllable. The Chinese characters, with English definitons as their tooltips, are ordred by the frequency of usage.
February 13, 2009	Added Chinese character structure information for simplified Chinese characters. The structure information is based on the the 12 Ideographic Description Characters (IDCs) introduced in ISO 10646.
February 8, 2009	Added additional character order animations. Now the system covers ALL the characters defined in the national standard character set of mainland China. Reviewed and corrected all the simplified character stroke order to ensure it conforms to the 《现代汉语通用字笔顺规范》 (Modern Chinese Commonly Used Character Stroke Order Standard) published by 国家语委和中华人民共和国新闻出版署(China National Language And Character Working Committee and General Administration of Press and Publication of the Peoples' Republic of China) in 1997 Added additional character order animations for traditional characters and checked the order info to ensure they conform to the standard issued by the Taiwan Ministry of Education. Added a configuration to allow the user to select either empty boxes for writing or shaded characters for tracing on the lines when the decomposition of strokes are finished.
January 10, 2009	Added character decomposition information (radicals and components), usage frequency and the corresponding traditional character(s) for every simplified character in the system Checked the latest version of Xinhua Zhidian(Chinese Character Dictionary) for every character in the system to make sure the correctness and completeness of the Mandarin pronunciation Added Open File buton on the Imported Characters pop-up to allow users to load characters directly from a text file. Worksheet generation for large number of characters is much faster. The system will prompt a Save As dialog to save the generated PDF file. Character look-up results are now ordered by usage frequency
December 30, 2008	The system now remembers the imported and studied characters, even after you exit your broswer or shut down your operating system. Added Import button to the Imported Characters pop-up to allow the users to import, instead of searching the Chinese<->English dictionary, Chinese characters from files and other sources to the character animator. Added Save As button to the Studied Characters pop-up to export the studied characters to a file. Added Save As button to the Imported Characters pop-up to export the imported characters to a file. Improved Search By English capability. Now searching common, short English words, such as "also", "if", "I", etc, returns correct results.
December 23, 2008	Added Wildcard Search support and a new blank grid style.
December 20, 2008	Dropped built-in Chinese font in Arch Chinese (Simplified) to further speed up page loading and added additional character animations. Now the system covers over 12,000 Chinese characters in total.
December 15, 2008	Added Arch Chinese (Traditional), a separate learning system targeted for traditional Chinese character learners.
December 8, 2008	Per a registered member's request, added an additional writing box size option for writing sheet generation. Now the user can select Small, Medium, Large and Extra Large character size during worksheet generation. The default size is Medium.
November 19, 2008	Added Slideshow feature for the studied characters. Now you can watch the animations, along with pronunciation, English definition, stroke number, example phrases and example sentence, for all the studied characters by clicking the Slideshow button on the toolbar. Alternatively, you can click the Slideshow button on the Studied Characters pop-up.
November 16, 2008	Added Pinyin display for the example sentences; added more simple sentences and dropped thousands of complicated ones
November 15, 2008	Added Standard Mandarin Chinese Pinyin Table , the complete listing of all Pinyin syllables and their tone variations used in standard Mandarin.
November 09, 2008	Improved character writing worksheet generation. Now the system allows the users to select different writing box sizes, writing grid styles and stroke printing colors.
November 06, 2008	Added searching characters/phrases/example sentences by English phrases, English sentence fragments (e.g. prefer to, might as well, my Chinese teacher, am going to), Chinese phrase, Chinese sentence patterns or fragments (such as 与其...不如)
November 02, 2008	Reworked character writing worksheet generation. Now the generate worksheets display the stroke sequences for individual characters
October 19, 2008	Added character look-up by radicals. Also, the example sentences of each character have been reorganized. Now easy ones display first.
October 13, 2008	Added example sentences. As in example phrases, you can click any characters in the sentences to look up the meanings and usage of the clicked character.
September 28, 2008	Added Chinese character learning flashcard
September 25, 2008	www.ArchChinese.com launched

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