In order to assist you and your students we provide some wordlists found in some common Chinese learning methods. You can open them via the File-Open menu. The wordlists will be installed in the wordlists directory.

• Chinees een Makkie (Chapters 1 + 2)
• Chinese for Today (Chapters 1 + 2)
• Colloquial Chinese (Chapters 1 + 2)
• Contemporary Chinese (Chapters 1 + 2)
• Examples of tone combinations
• Mandarin Sounds (around 28MB) from www.chinese-lessons.com includes more than 1100 single syllable sounds
• qchzhu-list contrasting initials 'q', 'c', 'ch', 'z', and 'zh' (around 1.8MB)
• iau-uai-list contrasting 'iau' and 'uai' (around 1.3MB)
• zsshx-list contrasting initials 'z', 's', 'sh', and 'x' (around 493K)
• hgk-list contrasting initials 'h', g', and 'k' (around 572K)
Lists with sound samples derived from Mandarin Sounds (www.chinese-lessons.com)
All Mandarin Sounds recordings are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

How to create word lists

These word list distributions are simple ZIP files with the name <list name>.sgc. They contain a list of all the words in pinyin with the name wordlist.txt with one word per line (only ASCII characters) and optionally a sound file for each word in the list. The sound files should be named <pinyin word>.ext, where <pinyin word> is the pinyin transcription, eg, sheng1zi4, and ext the sound extension type (eg, wav). Note that SpeakGoodChinese uses Praat to process the sound files. So only those sound files recognized by Praat can be used (see Praat: Read from file...). Currently, SpeakGoodChinese will only use .wav files as examples. Don't forget to include a LICENSE.txt file with the copyright and licensing information. If you use one of the Creative Commons licenses or the GNU GPL, we might be willing to put your list on our web-site.

It is possible to use SpeakGoodChinese to record example audio files for wordlists. See the Articles page for instructions. The recorded files have file-names that start with the intended pinyin spelling of the word, followed by other aspects (eg, a time stamp). Select those recordings you consider good enough as examples and rename them to <pinyin>.wav (replace <pinyin> by the target word, eg, ni3hao3). Copy them to the target wordlist directory for inclusion in the distribution.