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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

#21

Post by coldpie »

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?

I'm at a similar level, maybe a little behind that. I don't have any advice for you, but I'll relate the path I am planning to take. Would be happy to hear others' thoughts, too.

My feeling is this level is just too early to read "real" texts, so I am continuing to just use graded readers. I use the Du Chinese app for this, it contains a bunch of short stories at different comprehension levels, and has a spoken accompaniment to each story read by a real speaker (not AI/TTS). I also have some physical books from LingLing Mandarin, I like the challenge of not having a dictionary immediately to hand like I do in the app. My hope is by the time I finish with the Advanced stages of each of these sets of readers, I will be able to start reading "real" texts and fill in gaps with a dictionary app, at which point there is an infinite supply of material.

I do worry I'll end up at the "10% missing comprehension" described in the article, though, at which point I guess I'll try to find even higher level graded readers, if they exist. We'll see.

Re: 中文 Literacy Speedrun II: Character Cyclotron

#22

Post by 59percentmore »

itsthecourier wrote: post #17

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…

  >Empty landing page with a "Sign in with Google" button

  >Can't find anyone else talking about it online, no screenshots of the gameplay, nothing
That's gonna be a no from me, dawg. It sounds like a cool idea, but sites have to get better about asking you to hand over your credentials without even telling you what exactly your getting for them.

Re: 中文 Literacy Speedrun II: Character Cyclotron

#23

Post by comboy »

Great minds think alike :D https://hanzirama.com/character/%E5%AD%A6

It is also allowing me to see all relevant associations easily when revealing the card in built in SRS, you add cards to SRS as you browse, so they are related to what you already know / currently exploring.

Mind you, all data visible is collected from different reputable available sources. When you click "explain" there's a clearly marked LLM explanation, but my explanation generation pipeline pushed all generated explanations through 5 different models including all top Chinese-first for verification, and on average it took a few iterations back and forth to iron out any information that could potentially mislead the learner.

You can actually see thousands of words I typed just working on that pipeline here https://hanzirama.com/making-of

Re: 中文 Literacy Speedrun II: Character Cyclotron

#25

Post by teshigahara »

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.

Indeed, his premise is quite flawed. Yes, you will have difficulty understanding everything you read at an early stage, but you aren't supposed to be able to understand everything. You read to heavily reinforce the most common words and patterns that show up constantly, and from that base you pick up bits and pieces as you go along.

Under normal circumstances, even if you grind out "knowing" all the words in advance you will still struggle to read any basic sentence and you've essentially wasted time because it's an unskippable step; to be good at reading you need to read a lot. He seems to already know Chinese though, so this might work for him since he is not really having to learn the language or specific vocabulary, just how it's actually written.

Re: 中文 Literacy Speedrun II: Character Cyclotron

#26

Post by ragazzina »

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?

It is normal that there's no native content at HSK3 level. It would be like looking for native content at A1 level in English. But I found the "actual textbooks with precisely-calibrated texts" / graded readers are not that bad. My teacher is a martian was OK, I want to read The Monkey’s Paw now.

Re: 中文 Literacy Speedrun II: Character Cyclotron

#28

Post by kdheiwns »

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?

Read simple novels and look things up in a dictionary when you see a bunch of words that don't make sense. Watch shows with subtitles and do the same. Chat with people in the language. This is how non-natives learn English outside of school. It's also how non-natives learn Chinese.

Ain't nobody downloading stuff from GitHub and splitting things into tokens to learn English like the other commenter is suggesting lmfao. But people are obsessed with bizarre and completely inhuman methods like that when they learn Asian languages. I cannot understand why, and it's seriously just Asian languages.

Re: 中文 Literacy Speedrun II: Character Cyclotron

#29

Post by rockluck »

comboy wrote: post #23

Great minds think alike :D https://hanzirama.com/character/%E5%AD%A6 It is also allowing me to see all relevant associations easily when revealing the card in built in SRS, you add cards to SRS as you browse, so they are related to what you already know / currently exploring. Mind you, all data visible is collected from different reputable available sources. When you click "explain" there's a clearly marked LLM expla…

this looks incredible and exactly like something i've been wanting. is there the same amount of depth for the 9k+ characters? if this is open source, id love to build on it;i was wandering if op had posted his on github.
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