It's not too hard to edit the word lists in the Mobile Chinese Flashcards program, or to add your own word lists. To do so, you should first open the Flashcards.jar file with a ZIP archive manager such as 7Zip or WinRAR, but preferably not WinZIP because apparently some versions convert upper-case files and directories to lower case, which can cause the program to fail to run on some devices.
Once you have opened the archive, you should extract the contents to a directory and start to add or edit word lists with a text editor. They use UFT-8 encoding and the CEDICT format, which is the same as ZDT, the most popular free Chinese flashcard application. The CEDICT format is as follows:
traditional Chinese [tab] simplfied Chinese [tab] pinyin [tab] /definition/
That description might not be too clear, so here's an example that will probably make more sense:
中國 中国 zhong1 guo2 /China/
As the current version of the flashcard program doesn't include traditional characters you don't need to include these - the program only starts reading after the first Tab. Your word list might look something like this:
Using the CEDICT format means that you can use word lists from ZDT, which can be downloaded for free from this section of their website, and a selection of these are included in the standard version of this program. You shouldn't make your word lists shouldn't be much longer than a one or two hundred words, because mobile phones don't have much processing power and take quite a long time to process longer lists. You should also make sure not to leave any blank lines at the end of the file.
Some people have reported that Microsoft Notepad messes up the formatting of these files, but there are a number of free text editors that preserve the formatting. I used gedit to create my word lists, but for Windows users I recommend EditPad Lite.
Once you have created your new word list, copy it into the directory you extracted the jar archive into, as shown below. If you add a new word list or change the name of any word lists, you should edit the files.data file inside the archive accordingly (this is also a UTF-8 encoded text file). Make sure to use exactly the same file name (including capitalisation) as the name of the file you added - in the example shown below the file is called ZDT_Top_100_Chars, with no filename extension, but it might just as well have been called something else such as 100chars.txt.
Once you have finished editing, you can create a new .jar file with your new word lists. Make sure you choose the zip format and call the file Flashcards.jar (not .zip).
Once you have created the new archive, you should edit the Flashcards.jad file with a text editor and set the MIDlet-Jar-Size value to the new size of the Flashcards.jar file (in bytes). Right-click on your new Flashcards.jar file and say "Properties" to find this out.
If everything has gone well, you should be able to transfer the Flashcards.jad and Flashcards.jar files to your mobile phone and practice or test yourself on your new word list.
Back to the main Mobile Chinese Flashcards Page