Kuai Xue Chinese Teaching Tool Copyright Norman Matloff, 1993, 1995 KX is a program for viewing Chinese files, intended as a teaching tool. It accelerates the process of learning to read Chinese, by eliminating the delay and tedium involved in manually performing dictionary lookups. Instead, dictionary lookup is done electronically, via the mouse. Cantonese (Lau system) and Mandarin (pinyin) pronunciations for the character and some English meanings for it are then displayed. Variant readings for a character are also indicated. Moreover, each lookup is also recorded to a file, which the student can print after exiting KX. He or she will then have a printed record of the new characters learned in the last KX session, which can then be reviewed at the student's leisure. To use KX, one needs either a Big5 DOS environment, such as that provided by KC, or an Hz DOS environment, such as ZWDOS. One merely enters the environment, and then runs KX on whatever file is to be viewed. Your PC's CPU must be either a 386, 486 or Pentium. To install: 1. Make a directory named KX, say C:\KX (We will assume this from this point on.) To do so, type MKDIR C:\KX 2. Add that directory to your path. To do so, type ADDPATH.BAT 3. Add a line SET KXDIR=C:\KX to your C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT file. 4. Make sure that the directory C:\KX contains the following files: KX32.EXE GO32.EXE CANMAN.B5 CANMAN.HZ COMPOUND.B5 COMPOUND.HZ 5. Reboot. To run: Typing KX32 by itself, no other parameters, will give you a list of options. Recommended usage is KX32 infilename for BIG5 files and KX32 -H -T infilename for Hz files. While in KX, use the f key to go forward one page in the file, the b key to backward, and the q key to quit. The original source code was written by Norman Matloff in 1993. Joel Chen made modifications in 1995. The compound dictionaries are constantly being expanded, adding more words. The latest versions may always be obtained at the World Wide Web URL http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/chinese/chinese.html/KX/Packages/Dict.tar.gz This program is freely copyable for educational, noncommercial uses only. No guarantee of any kind is made for any purpose whatsoever. Questions are welcome. Please call, write or send e-mail: Norm Matloff Department of Computer Science University of California at Davis Davis, CA 95616 (916) 752-1953 matloff@cs.ucdavis.edu