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中文 Literacy Speedrun II: Character Cyclotron

blog.kevinzwu.com

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Re: 中文 Literacy Speedrun II: Character Cyclotron

#11

Post by pjc50 »

kdheiwns wrote: post #5
wren6991 wrote: post #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.

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, a…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47804903 - they can speak it, but not read it.

Re: 中文 Literacy Speedrun II: Character Cyclotron

#12

Post by [deleted] »

wren6991 wrote: post #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.

[deleted]

Re: 中文 Literacy Speedrun II: Character Cyclotron

#13

Post by maenbalja »

I liked the 10% @@@ example, demonstrated their point pretty well.

Also for anyone who speaks or is currently learning Chinese... I've been working on a multiplayer CJK word game that shares a similar efficient brute force style of learning to the author's approach (although presented via gameplay instead of tooling). Every turn you get a random character and must type in a word that contains the char in ANY position. If you like fast paced word games it might be up your alley: https://danobang.com/?game_lang=cmn

Re: 中文 Literacy Speedrun II: Character Cyclotron

#14

Post by ramon156 »

> I opened Claude Code and started rambling into my mic. It wrote thousands of lines of questionably efficient JavaScript. I didn't read a single one.

Hm. I always knew voice mode was a thing, but I have never tried it. What's people's experience with it?

Being able to correct my words is a good thing. Hell, I did it ~3 times when writing this comment. I can't do that when I'm rambling. I'll trip, or CC will think I'm finished.

Re: 中文 Literacy Speedrun II: Character Cyclotron

#15

Post by nixon_why69 »

kdheiwns wrote: post #5
wren6991 wrote: post #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.

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, a…

I'm at HSK3 level and struggle to find things to read outside of my actual textbooks with precisely-calibrated texts. If I can't read am average billboard, what should I read to improve?

Re: 中文 Literacy Speedrun II: Character Cyclotron

#16

Post by yellow_lead »

> I would end up copy-pasting interesting words into the dictionary window to pull up the word entry. SLOW!

> I would then click on the component characters to open their nested dictionary entries. SLOW!

> If I needed to remember the stroke order, I would scroll down for the static display. SLOW!

So, all of these are included in Anki-xiehanzi(https://github.com/krmanik/Anki-xiehanzi). Free open source software like Anki & xiehanzi can save you from using all those tokens.

Re: 中文 Literacy Speedrun II: Character Cyclotron

#17

Post by itsthecourier »

I'm trying something like Duolingo mixed with Dark souls

https://dondeng.com

WIP (need more work in multi-hanzi words), but won't stay in the same 5 words for more than a day. it has been working well for me

the most interesting thing was GPT helped with the sentences and simplified words meaning and bing translate provided the audios

the goal is get the ~2000 words you need to be proficient in 1 year, 5 words a day plus refresh old words, also it keep track of your progress against the year, no streaks

Re: 中文 Literacy Speedrun II: Character Cyclotron

#18

Post by yorwba »

nixon_why69 wrote: post #15
kdheiwns wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, a…

I'm at HSK3 level and struggle to find things to read outside of my actual textbooks with precisely-calibrated texts. If I can't read am average billboard, what should I read to improve?

1. Take a large collection of text, e.g. from https://opus.nlpl.eu/corpora-search/zh-CN&en

2. Split into sentences and tokenize sentences into words, e.g. using https://github.com/fxsjy/jieba

3. Count how often each word appears and sort sentences by descending frequency of the least common word.

4. Use binary search to find a location in the sorted collection of sentences where the difficulty feels about right.

Of course this gives you a collection of disjointed sentences, but you can always go to the original file and look at the surrounding context when you find an interesting or confusing one.

Re: 中文 Literacy Speedrun II: Character Cyclotron

#19

Post by jannesan »

yorwba wrote: post #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.

here you go: https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/61471-mega-manda...

i’ve used this for a brief while, but dropped practicing handwriting completely shortly after.

Re: 中文 Literacy Speedrun II: Character Cyclotron

#20

Post by jwrallie »

kdheiwns wrote: post #5
wren6991 wrote: post #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.

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, a…

I agree completely. I will focus of Japanese because it’s the language I have experience with.

With a good order (RTK), optimal reviews (SRS) and putting 30 minutes a day it is possible to learn keyword to Kanji writing in a couple of months to one year. Make it two if you are a busy person. After that you need 10 minutes to maintain the knowledge per day. (I’m assuming 2200 Kanji).

People that did that successfully will recommend it to be done as early as possible as they know the boost in learning it provides.

I think it’s a trap, because it’s possible to get to a very useful level in the language while ignoring Kanji, and most people will be perfectly happy staying there. At that point you will have a much better idea if you really need to go all the way.

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