Elevator Pitch
CantoRead is a mobile application that allows you to learn Cantonese through the Chinese characters you’re exposed to every day.
Busted Elevator Pitch
Imagine you and I are stuck in a busted elevator. We’ve been in there for quite some time, and you say to me
“Tell me a story Angus Cheng”.
“What sort of story do you want to hear?”
“Tell me about that new mobile application you’re making”
“Ok”
It all started back in 2013, I was working at a shared office and would go running with a few people there once a week. One of the people I would go running with was, and still is, called Hubert. I’d get lunch with Hubert quite often, we’d go into restaurants where the menus were not printed in English. Hubert was able to read all those menus. The weird thing was Hubert had only been in Hong Kong for a few months. So I said to him “How come you’re so good at reading Chinese?”
“Well I tell you what Angus, I’ve got a system ya see. I have a small book I carry with me, whenever I see Chinese characters that I don’t recognise I write it down in this book. When I go home I create flash cards from the new words I saw during the day. After that I spend some time reviewing my flash cards”.
Ever since he told me that I thought “Hubert that is a good system, it does sound like a bit of a pain in the ass though”. In the back of my mind I’ve been thinking about building a mobile application to replicate Hubert’s system. Instead of writing text into a book, a user should be able to take a photo of the text and then create flash cards from that text.
So the application has two modes of operation:
- Create flash cards from text you don’t recognise
- Review those flash cards
That’s the plan for CantoRead.