'TAKE THE ENGLISH WORD 'jealous',' Professor Myles Harding said. 'In Chinese, it consists of four characters that translate as 'fighting the wind and drinking vinegar'.' The Swinburne University of Technology mathematician chortled: 'Isn't that a wonderful way of expressing jealousy? You could study Chinese for six years at school and four years at university and never learn that expression - but with my system you can.'
Professor Harding has designed a CD-Rom-based software that provides instant translation of complex character combinations in Chinese. As well as translating the characters and words, the system also sounds out the characters so it expands the user's vocabulary and aids learning.
'Although I'm a mathematician and computer scientist, I've always been interested in Chinese, but it's hard to learn,' he said. 'I had school friends who spoke Cantonese and somehow I learned that easily.
'After I completed my PhD, I went back to university to learn Chinese but was staggered to find that after six years in school and four years at university I still couldn't read as well as an eight-year-old from Hong Kong because the amount of stuff you have to learn is enormous.'
One of the big difficulties with learning to read Chinese is the continuous stream of characters. Professor Harding said it would be like learning English with all the capital letters and spaces removed.
He thought about devising a computer program that would teach people how to read Chinese. One crucial problem was that a student had to learn thousands of different characters and then the thousands of ways they could be combined to make words and sentences.