This is slightly off topic. I just bought a mac, and I'm trying to get Chinese Word Extractor working on it.

Any expert mac users have any ideas? It's such a crucial tool to my Skritter study that, if I can't figure out how to run it, then I'm just going to keep my old Windows machine to use it.

And I"m not looking to buy an entire copy of windows to run a piece of shareware. I tried WineBottler, but couldn't get it to work. Maybe some Mac wizard on here can tell me how I'm screwing up??

The Chinese Word Extractor can be found here: http://www.zhtoolkit.com/posts/tools/ , scroll to the very bottom, it's the last tool on the list

I can't help, except to say that byzanti's chinese reader definitely works on macs (and only macs): http://www.byzanti.co.uk/

Not sure if it could work as a replacement for you for chinese word extractor.

I tried to enter in my Skritter words, and every time I do so it crashes. I think I'm going to have to wait for some later versions.

atdlouis, could you paste the Skritter vocab export that's crashing it into a txt document and email it to me so I can figure out what's going wrong? Thanks!

byz (at) byzanti (dot)co(dot)uk

@atdlouis

I got Chinese Word Extractor working before using Wine Bottler, a program that allows running (basic) Windows applications. I remember it being fairly painless to setup.

atdlouis - check your mail!

@atdlouis
Which words you put into skritter for review? I mean how do you leave words not to be studied i skrittter?
Is it on the basis of Freq. per 1 million words or No. occurrences ?
As mentioned the Zhtoolkit site even I don't want to follow the The Brick wall method. Which words I should leave as for now I am reading really simple text from http://chinesereadingpractice.com and all the words in beginner level seem to be important even though many occur just once in the small text.
@junglegirl your inputs..
@byzanti any thoughts?

@icebar what do you do ?

Some people like to stick pretty hard to a textbook series, and just follow the word progression as you go along. That's probably a pretty solid way to do things, especially if you have a textbook you like. If you're looking for guidance on what words to learn, it would help.

I didn't do this, but rather just added words as I came across them, figuring I'd need most of them eventually. Striking a balance would have been sensible...

Probably the most important thing is more that when you learn a word, you learn it properly, and make sure you know how to use it in a sentence.

I've definitely been guilty of the Brick Wall method in the past. I first started learning Chinese with Chinesepod, which was great but it meant that I didn't learn words in the normal order that you would when following a textbook, and now I have some pretty specialized, low-frequency words in Skritter from specific Chinesepod lessons (e.g. "first baseman" and "Boston Red Sox").

I'm now trying to focus my studies on the HSK lists. Even though my vocabulary is around 5,700 words, I'm still missing quite a few of the 2,500 words in the HSK 5 list. I'm now adding those, and when I finish I will move on to the HSK 6 list. I don't like to study words straight from a list without context though, so I'm using the Chinese word extractor to identify HSK words in texts that I read and then adding those words. I'm currently trying not to add too many non-HSK words, unless I think a word is really interesting or useful.