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Show HN: My AI writing assistant for Chinese

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Re: Show HN: My AI writing assistant for Chinese

#21

Post by alisonatwork »

Hammerhead12321 wrote: post #15
alisonatwork wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're looking for a local translation tool, I wrote a small CC-CEDICT lookup script in shell+JS then eventually rewrote it in Go so I could run it on whatever computer I was using at the time: https://github.com/alisonatwork/cedict It just does a dumb greedy search to try find the longest chain of characters for the translation, but that turns out to work more often than not: $ cedict -m 果汁很好喝 果汁 [guǒ zhī] /fruit…

I don’t mean to derail this thread, but I am considering a stint in Taiwan to learn Chinese. I am wondering how different the accent/dialect is compared to mainland China. Are you a native speaker or did you learn while there?

I am an ethnic European who lived in China for several years and now live in Taiwan. I speak and read Chinese at a level good enough for casual conversations, doing banking/rent/etc and getting by in the workplace, but I am far from an expert.

The accent and dialect is mutually intelligible on both sides of the strait, but there is a fair bit of vocabulary and some pronunciations that clearly mark you as having learned in one place or the other. Think of it as the difference between British and American English.

The bigger difference in my opinion is simplified versus traditional. It is possible to learn one and read the other, but having lived almost 2 years in Taiwan now I still find a wall of text in traditional a lot harder to digest. Personally I think simplified is more legible, especially on low res screens or at a distance, but it's unlikely to change over here for political reasons.

Taiwan is probably a fine place to learn Chinese as a beginner. It's easier to "cheat" due to the English language resources available in the community, but if you make an effort I'm sure you can immerse yourself.

Re: Show HN: My AI writing assistant for Chinese

#22

Post by dwilding »

unignorant wrote: post #9

Thanks for sharing this! I occasionally use google translate and/or GPT4 for similar purposes, but your tool makes the workflow a bit simpler. I've found creative writing in a target language is great for learning.

Happy to share, thanks!

I also use GPT-4 for explaining the meaning of sentences in more detail (as in JimDabell’s comment). Often my questions are like “how would a native speaker say this colloquially” - I’ve found it really valuable to be able to have a back-and-forth on why something works the way it does

Re: Show HN: My AI writing assistant for Chinese

#23

Post by dwilding »

JimDabell wrote: post #8

I’m just starting to learn Mandarin at the moment and I’ve found LLMs useful for this. I can ask the question “I’m learning Mandarin, can you break this sentence into individual hanzi and explain it?” and it will do a good job of explaining everything. Or I can say something like “I was transcribing an audio recording for an exercise and I wrote X but the answer was Y, what did I do wrong?” and it will tell me that I…

I use GPT-4 for this kind of exposition too. If you haven’t come across Pleco [1] yet, I can highly recommend it. It’s a high quality Chinese-English dictionary with a lot of helpful features for reading Chinese

One feature I use a lot is the clipboard reader, which lets you step through Chinese text character by character and shows you the meaning of each character. It can be faster than using an LLM, but you don’t get the whole-sentence meaning or the ability to ask follow-up questions like you can with an LLM. But it’s a great app all round (some features are paid)

[1] https://www.pleco.com/

Re: Show HN: My AI writing assistant for Chinese

#25

Post by bulubulu »

Thanks for making this tool, highly useful! In the example you used, more native way is to include the "把" verb structure i.e. 你得把鞋带系好 instead of 你得系好鞋带. I was thinking if this could be improved by adding some examples in the prompt? I've heard that LLMs are good with learning by examples. I'm not sure if it works since you're first getting the English output and then translating it.

Re: Show HN: My AI writing assistant for Chinese

#26

Post by dwilding »

bulubulu wrote: post #25

Thanks for making this tool, highly useful! In the example you used, more native way is to include the "把" verb structure i.e. 你得把鞋带系好 instead of 你得系好鞋带. I was thinking if this could be improved by adding some examples in the prompt? I've heard that LLMs are good with learning by examples. I'm not sure if it works since you're first getting the English output and then translating it.

Thanks! Earlier in the project I tried to find a way to generate English but with Chinese grammar - something like “you need to grab your shoelaces and tie them well” - as a way to help memorize grammatical structures. But I didn’t get very far with that. For one reason, I couldn’t coax an LLM to output such unnatural English (!)

So in the end I decided that I can ask GPT-4 to explain alternative structures based on the translation I get

Ideally, I would like to find a reliable way to directly transform my first attempt at an expression into a native-level expression, without necessary routing via English. It didn’t seem doable with the LLMs I tried so far, but there are others I can try, and maybe some training would help too - as you say

Re: Show HN: My AI writing assistant for Chinese

#27

Post by peterburkimsher »

JimDabell wrote: post #8

I’m just starting to learn Mandarin at the moment and I’ve found LLMs useful for this. I can ask the question “I’m learning Mandarin, can you break this sentence into individual hanzi and explain it?” and it will do a good job of explaining everything. Or I can say something like “I was transcribing an audio recording for an exercise and I wrote X but the answer was Y, what did I do wrong?” and it will tell me that I…

I wrote https://pingtype.github.io to split sentences into their words, and translate each word to pinyin and English. That might be easier if you're trying to read a longer section of text.

Re: Show HN: My AI writing assistant for Chinese

#28

Post by zhifenzhu »

The website is quite interesting, but when entering certain Chinese phrases like "我服了你" "我真服了" or "你吃屎吧" it provides incorrect translations in English and Chinese. It's essential to review and address these inaccuracies to prevent misleading interpretations for users. Indeed, many expressions cannot be directly translated into English; instead, they require interpretation based on context.

Re: Show HN: My AI writing assistant for Chinese

#29

Post by matthewfelgate »

dwilding wrote: post #3
matthewfelgate wrote: post #2

Oh thanks for sharing. This seems super useful. It's been a long time since I learned some Chinese but this would have been very useful when I was learning Chinese. Quite often I find myself in that situation where I know most of a sentence but not how to put together.

Thanks for the kind words! I’ve found it very helpful for staying in the zone and getting better at “thinking” in Chinese If you start learning Chinese again in the future, I hope you find it useful too!

I think this is where language learning happens: when you know how to say part of the sentence but not all of it.
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