Release notes for KEY5

KEY version 5 is more than an upgrade to the previous KEY versions because it has been newly developed from the ground up. Its new design has an infrastructure that can accommodate numerous new features. At the same time, most functions from the previous KEY versions have been significantly improved. New features are:

The features described below were available in previous versions of KEY, but have been improved and streamlined within the new design of this version KEY5.

Advanced features from previous versions that have been streamlined:

For Teachers and Learners: two innovative features in KEY

The Timed Reading module and the Annotation feature are the most recent enhancements to the KEY software package. These enhancements provide a CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) tool for improving Chinese language reading and comprehension skills. By segmenting a Chinese text passage, such as text from the Internet or teacher-generated KEY text files, into manageable syntactic units, the Timed Reading module allows the reader of Chinese to practice word segmentation, phrase comprehension, eye movement, and thus enhances overall reading efficiency.

Automatic authoring of multimedia lessons with the TR button on the KEY toolbar

Write, or copy/paste the text you want for reading practice (from a Chinese website, or other electronic source). Press the TR button on the KEY toolbar, which automatically segments the text into manageable portions and takes you directly to the Reading Timer panel, where you can set the various options (like Pinyin, Tones, Sound etc.). Clicking on "Start" will begin the automatic reading cycle. Choose this fast way to time-read a Chinese text if you want to accept the default segmenting of the system.

If you wish to manually segment the text, do not press the TR button, but click on "Select Timed passage" on the KEY "Edit" menu. Enter your preferred segment length and click OK to view the segmented text. Before proceeding to the Reading Timer panel, you can now review and, if desired, change the segmenting – details see below.

The Timed Reading features in detail:

  1. Selecting the passage for Timed Reading and segmenting it into units for practice. Display the text which you want to practice in Timed Reading mode on the KEY Edit screen. You may write the text yourself in KEY, or you may copy/paste the text into KEY from an outside source, such as a Chinese web page. Now select (=highlight) the text passage you want to practice in Timed Reading mode. Then, on the KEY "Edit" menu, click on "Select Timed Passage", which brings up the Auto-segmenting panel. Here you can set the length of the Timed Reading units within the passage. The default setting is 10 characters. For example, if you leave the setting of 10 in place and click OK, your text passage will be auto-segmented into units not longer than 10 Chinese characters, through the insertion of BLUE half-spaces. The auto-segmenting algorithm cuts the text into reading units based on linguistic reconstruction, and thus avoids splitting polysyllabic expressions (such as words 詞 cí and idiomatic expressions 成語 chéngyû. At the same time, the entire passage selected for Timed Reading is marked with a yellow background. - If you are satisfied with the auto-segmenting as it appears in the text (BLUE half-spaces), you can now proceed to setting the parameters, and to the reading practice (details see 2. below). In case you want to modify the existing segmentation, you can manually add more segmentation points and/or delete existing segmentation points. To add a segmentation mark (BLUE half-space) manually, place the cursor at the desired new segmentation point and click the "Seg" button on the KEY toolbar; this inserts a BLUE half-space at cursor position. To take out an existing BLUE half-space, just delete it like any other character.
  2. Setting the parameters for Timed Reading in the selected passage. With the segmented Chinese text on a yellow background displayed on the KEY screen, click on the item "Reading Timer" (on the KEY "View" menu). This brings up the Reading Timer panel on which the display time per Hanzi can be set (scale from 100 ms - 3 sec per Hanzi), together with other Timed Reading parameters.
  3. Notes on the Reading Timer panel:
    1. The punctuation delay applies to comma, semicolon, full stop, question mark and exclamation mark; it does not apply to the Chinese serial comma 頓號 dùnhào.
    2. If "Display Word Boundaries" is checked, a GREEN half space is inserted between the Chinese words, to assist the reader in recognizing the word boundaries in the text.
    3. Read-aloud practice mode is set by "Sound check": in this mode, another phase is added to the Timed Reading of each segment, during which the reader hears the segment read out aloud by the TTS module of KEY.
    4. With "Pinyin check" enabled, another practice phase is added to the Timed Reading of each segment: the reader sees the Pinyin-with-tonemarks version of the segment displayed in a second line above the Hanzi text.
    5. With both "Sound check" and "Pinyin check" enabled, the loud model reading through KEY and the Pinyin-with-tonemarks transcription of the segment go hand in hand, in the additional phase.
    6. Checking "Enable Tool Tip" activates the Chinese/English tool tip dictionary. This allows the reader to query the English meaning of a Chinese word by moving the mouse pointer onto the word (DO NOT CLICK, just hover). While the tool tip window with the English meaning is displayed, the timer is temporarily halted.
    7. If you have made annotations to the text, you may want to enable "Annotation Tool Tip", which will display the annotations when pointing at the annotated word.

Summary: Enabling all features in the checkboxes of the Reading Timer panel allows you to thoroughly analyze a Chinese text passage, within the self-imposed time constraints of the Reading Timer. Thus, the Timed Reading module of KEY is an interactive learning tool for reading and comprehending Chinese text, by teaching word boundaries, pronunciation, Pinyin-with-tonemarks transcription and the English meaning in a dynamic and integrated multimedia lesson.

Overview of other operational features:

Overview of the Annotation feature:

You can make an annotation to a word or text passage ("object"), hide the annotation and automatically retrieve it through the annotation tool tip feature. Annotation objects are marked through the item "Create Annotation" with a colour background (10 pre-set colours plus Underline available). The colour background/underline feature allows you to mark the annotations according to different categories you may want to create, such as grammatical, vocabulary-related, associated meanings or any other category you have in mind. Also, multiple annotations can be made on the same object, either in the same file or in different files, by single or multiple users. If such multiple annotations have been made, pointing at the colour-marked object will search all currently open KEY files for annotations and display them in a tool tip window. Cycle through multiple annotations in a displayed tool tip window with the right-arrow key. The annotations are also accessible in Timed Reading mode, if the annotation tool tip is enabled.

Creating word/character lists for a given text file, comparing files regarding vocabulary, and generating vocabulary statistics are new features available from the Annotations menu.

Creating word/character lists for a given text file.

This feature automatically analyzes the vocabulary of a given Chinese character text, at the level of compound words / characters. With a Chinese text in a KEY file displayed, clicking "Create Word List" highlights the distinct words of the text at their first occurrence, in the colour chosen. When a specific word recurs later in the text, the background remains white. At the same time, a list of all distinct words is appended to the text, in Annotation format. The list can be hidden or displayed (through the Annotation menu’s "Display / Hide Annotation"); if desired, the terms in the list can be annotated by the user. Before a vocabulary comparison between this file and another file can be done, the file must be saved. In order to preserve the original text file and prevent overwriting it, the file with the highlighted vocabulary and the appended word list is saved automatically under the new file name , "W" standing for "Word". (If a "Create Character List" was done on a file, it is saved under the file name , the "Z" standing for "zi", single character.)

Comparing files regarding vocabulary. Import List / Annotations.

Use this feature to compare your Chinese text against another text that was processed with "Create Word List" (or Create Character List). Clicking this item displays the "Open File" panel. Highlight the name of the file containing the Word/Character list (the filename should include either .W. or .Z.) and click "Open". This imports and superimposes the words from the previous file on your text. Thus, when a "Create Word List" (with a different colour) is done on the new text, the words that occurred in the previous text are excluded from being highlighted / listed as new words. Existing annotations from previous files will also be imported with this action.
(Note: Use this feature to compare one text file to one other text file, as described in detail in the illustrative example below. Ctrl+W and Ctrl+Z are hotkeys that combine the Create List and Import List actions, for the incremental buildup of lists in successive files. Use "Compare Words / Characters to Multiple Files" to compare one file against a batch of several files.) Illustrative example:
Let’s assume you have 4 texts (lessons) named Lesson1.key, Lesson2.key, Lesson3.key and Lesson4.key. Your goal is to find out what distinct new words (or characters) occur incrementally in each of these lessons. You are especially interested what new words occur in Lesson 4, compared to the first 3 lessons. There is a manual way to achieve this, using the "Create Word List" (or "Create Character List") and "Import List / Annotations" features mentioned above. There is also a streamlined, more automated way to achieve this, using the hotkey combination Ctrl+W (combines the two actions "Import List / Annotations" and "Create Word List") or - for the single-character level – Ctrl+Z (combines "Import List / Annotations" and "Create Character List").

A. Manual step-by-step operation. To convey a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms, we first walk you through our four-lesson example using the slower, step-by-step method:

B. Streamlined operation with the hotkeys Ctrl+W (word level) and Ctrl+Z (character level). These hotkeys automatically do both the "Import" and "Create" actions together. In our example:

Note that in this step-by-step approach the word lists from the previous files will be carried over into the new file, so that the word list of each new file is incrementally growing. However, when comparing the vocabulary of a (new) text against other (older) texts to find out what words (or characters) are new, it is not necessary to append the word lists of all files.

Therefore, if you just want to highlight and list the new words in a Chinese text file compared to other text files (e.g., new lesson compared to previous lessons), it is recommended to use the batch mode "Compare Words to Multiple Files" (or Compare Characters to Multiple Files), which automatically compares your presently displayed file against a batch of files.

Compare Words / Characters to Multiple Files.
This item allows you to compare the vocabulary of a given Chinese text file with multiple other files, in "batch" mode, at the word level. For example, you want to know which words in a Chinese text file are new in comparison to a number of older lessons. Open the Chinese text you wish to analyze in KEY, and on the Annotations menu click on "Compare Words to Multiple Files". The "Open File" panel is displayed; select the older lesson file(s) - to select multiple files, hold down the "Ctrl" or "Shift" keys respectively - and click "Open". KEY now contrasts all the distinct words from the selected multiple files against the new text, and highlights the new words in the new text at their first occurrence in the specified colour; a word list is appended to the text, consisting of the already known words (white background) and the new words in the text (in the specified colour). NOTE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THIS BATCH MODE AND THE STEP-BY-STEP MANUAL "CREATE WORD LIST" / "IMPORT LIST / ANNOTATIONS" MODE: in batch mode, the word lists from each of the multiple lessons are only temporarily created in the background, but they are not physically appended to the text of the files, as this is incrementally done in the step-by-step "Create / Import" mode.

Through the items "Create Word statistics" and "Create Character Statistics" on the Annotation menu you can automatically generate a statistical overview of the occurrence of vocabulary in a file, or in multiple files. Click the item on the Annota-tions menu, and in the "File list" display the names of the files you wish to analyze statistically. (With "Enable Annotation Tool Tip" being checked, you can view the legend of the statistical data.)

Example: Creating a computerized multimedia Chinese language lesson with the KEY Timed Reading module

The fast and easy way to create a Chinese multimedia lesson is to copy/paste Chinese text from the Internet or any other electronic source into the KEY screen, and press the "TR" button on the KEY toolbar. The text will be auto-segmented into manageable strings for reading, using the default setting of approx. 10-character-long individual passages.

However, if you want to take advantage of the authoring functions of KEY for electronic lessons and have more control over segmentation of the text, you can prepare the reading lesson manually (like customizing the length of reading passages, adding annotations etc.) in the following steps:

  1. Copy (or input) the text into a blank KEY file. Save this file under the desired name. Put the text into the desired typeface, size, etc.
  2. Select All and choose Format, Hanzi with Pinyin. Modify the Pinyin spacing, capitali-zation, word breaks, etc. as you wish.
    • Aside from using the Toggle Space button on the KEY toolbar, there are two ways to modify the parsing of words in Hanyu pinyin:
    • First, you can select (highlight) adjacent syllables that should be together as one word, then type Alt-L and L again. This performs Linguistic Reconstruction on the selected syllables and - provided the word is contained in KEY's dictionary - strings them together.
    • The second way is through the tooltip dictionary. Use the arrow keys to select the definition appropriate to the context, then type Ctrl-F (stands for "Fix"), then OK. This approach will add the string to the User Dictionary and cause it to be permanently registered in KEY's memory so the same error in parsing will not be made again in subsequent work.
  3. Add in your annotations to the text. Within the annotations themselves, you can use English, Chinese, or a combination of the two. Within the annotations, you can use italics and boldface (Ctrl-I makes selected text italicized, and Ctrl-B makes selected text bold). You can also use the Hanzi plus Pinyin mode within an annotation - useful if your note contains Chinese characters that students might not recognize. Note that the same word canNOT be annotated twice (e.g., once by itself and once as part of a longer string). Also note that if you annotate the same character, word or expression in two places within a text you do not need to write the same note twice - just leave the annotation for the second occurrence blank and your first note will show up attached to the second occurrence of the word. But if you want to give a different annotation for each occurrence (e.g. 來 lái in one place means 'for the past...' and in another place means 'in order to'), you must make the two occurrences different somehow (e.g., for the second occurrence, select an adjacent word in addition to 來 lái) or else both notes will show up in each place.
  4. Select the entire text via Edit, Select Timed Passage, and select a string length that is manageable for your students (usually 8 to 15 characters for students at lower levels of proficiency). Modify the segmentation as you wish - breaking the text up into sense groups. Try running the Timed Reading module to see whether your segmentation is viable in practice.
  5. When you have finished modifying the segmentation as you wish, make it permanent by pressing Ctrl_ (Control-underscore).
  6. Hide Annotations, Hide Marks, press Ctrl-Home (to make sure the file will open next time showing the first screen), and Save.
  7. To run the prepared text as an interactive multimedia lesson, click on "Reading Timer" (View menu), set the desired parameters on the Timed Reading panel and press "Start".