Tagging for Unassisted Reading

Tagging for unassisted reading refers to the marking of characters and words (CTR 10) so that definitions do not automatically appear in the dictionary windows. This feature is unique among Chinese reading programs.  No other program on the planet does this.

So how does this work. Say you’re reading in Chinese Toolbox READER and you come across a character you feel very confident about; when you see the character, you usually know what it means. So you press the spacebar. The character changes color, and the next time you encounter that character in your reading, the program will not show you its meaning in the character dictionary window. If you continue reading through the text, then you’ve learned to read the character you previously marked for unassisted reading. Congratulations. You’re making progress. If you happen to forget the meaning of the character, just press the spacebar again to display the definition of the character in the character dictionary window.

The concept is similar with words, only you would press Ctrl-spacebar to mark a word as recognizable. One of the main differences in the program’s handling of characters and words is that words are underlined. When you mark a word for unassisted reading (CTR 10), the underline is removed for that word wherever it occurs in the document you’re reading. Also, the word is added to a Known Words list which you can easily view in the reader simply by clicking on the “Known Words” button.

As you mark characters and words for unassisted reading, the program also keeps track of the number of characters and words you know (or at least can recognize), and for most learners of Chinese, this is a statistic we like to know.