I passed the countless hours reviewing flashcards of traditional Chinese characters while on buses and the MTR (subway) when I lived in Hong Kong almost 30 years ago. After about a year, I went through a nicely appointed box set of the One Thousand Basic Characters flashcards, which are jointly created by Chinese University of Hong Kong and Yale University (or more commonly known as, Yale in China). Back then, I could read a Cantonese newspaper with about 90 percent comprehension! (Here’s a tip: Never review flashcards in taxis. Anyone that has taken a taxi ride in Hong Kong or Taiwan, or played the video game “Crazy Taxi,” will understand why. Besides, taxi drivers are captive audiences for practicing spoken Chinese!)

The host has put together the most common 1000 culturally neutral images to create your own flashcards and share with others or you can chose an existing list from the following languages:

Part One: "An industry insider's opinion on language-learning software fallacies and realities." I’m a language-learning software believer. But I’m not a fanatic. This is the first in a series of posts that will contain some controversial ideas, which hopefully spawn a conversation about using software to learn a new language. As a foreign languages student, and a digital language-learning publishing insider, I know the industry’s ins and outs, and not-so-hidden secrets.