中文 Literacy Speedrun II: Character Cyclotron
blog.kevinzwu.com
中文 Literacy Speedrun II: Character Cyclotron
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Re: 中文 Literacy Speedrun II: Character Cyclotron
#2Interesting process. I wonder if he considered doing this with Anki. That would have given him a good SRS algo for free and Anki cards are also HTML+CSS+JS. I probably wouldn't try to put LLM calls onto my cards though
Re: 中文 Literacy Speedrun II: Character Cyclotron
#3> I decided to go against the grain of the near-universal advice to "learn to read by reading".
...Why? That advice is universal for a reason. The side adventure with Claude Code strikes me as a distraction from the fact that there is a hard thing you want to do but are avoiding because it's hard.
Re: 中文 Literacy Speedrun II: Character Cyclotron
#4> I decided to go against the grain of the near-universal advice to "learn to read by reading". ...Why? That advice is universal for a reason. The side adventure with Claude Code strikes me as a distraction from the fact that there is a hard thing you want to do but are avoiding because it's hard.
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Re: 中文 Literacy Speedrun II: Character Cyclotron
#5> I decided to go against the grain of the near-universal advice to "learn to read by reading". ...Why? That advice is universal for a reason. The side adventure with Claude Code strikes me as a distraction from the fact that there is a hard thing you want to do but are avoiding because it's hard.
This is a hilariously common thing with studiers of Asian languages. There are countless posts with people spending years, even more than a decade, just trying to memorize every single kanji and how to write it before even beginning vocabulary or basic grammar, then lamenting how difficult the language is and how they can't pass kindergarten level tests. So then they spend loads of money on apps, make custom tools, and find countless other ways to burn time.
Meanwhile others read books and get pretty good at their language of choice in a couple years.
Re: 中文 Literacy Speedrun II: Character Cyclotron
#6> A guy on a forum had hired a calligrapher to write three thousand characters in ballpoint pen
A shame that this amazing resource is not linked.
Re: 中文 Literacy Speedrun II: Character Cyclotron
#7I maintain an Anki deck for my chinese learning. Following the HSK books, I add new words to my deck with the character on front side and pinyin + definition + audio (from the CD and sliced using Audacity) on back side.
Re: 中文 Literacy Speedrun II: Character Cyclotron
#8> I decided to go against the grain of the near-universal advice to "learn to read by reading". ...Why? That advice is universal for a reason. The side adventure with Claude Code strikes me as a distraction from the fact that there is a hard thing you want to do but are avoiding because it's hard.
Did you read part 3? Doesn’t sound like “avoiding hard things” is really a problem for the author :)
Re: 中文 Literacy Speedrun II: Character Cyclotron
#9[deleted]
Re: 中文 Literacy Speedrun II: Character Cyclotron
#10Note on why this person is taking an unusual route: from https://blog.kevinzwu.com/cyborg-learning/ , they are a "second generation Chinese immigrant" and "heritage speaker"; that is, they live outside China, can speak the language because they learned it from their parents, but cannot read it.
Edit addendum: https://blog.kevinzwu.com/chinese-cursed-logographic-dags/ is a fun read. I've been using the imaginatively titled "kanji study" app, which uses the same Outlier database mentioned which has the graph based etymology.
There's an additional level of chaos when learning the "same" characters as kanji rather than hanzi.