Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Learn Chinese Through Novels

getchicory.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 57 posts

Re: Show HN: Learn Chinese Through Novels

#11

Post by colordrops »

I've been using Pleco with the text reader plugin on my mobile with great success. You can load any text file and read and bookmark like a regular book reading app. You can tap on any word to see the meaning and pronunciation, and add an unknown word to a flashcard deck.

With regard to content, I think the Hacker News crowd would most appreciate the San Ti (三体) trilogy (Three Body Problem trilogy). It's the first highly successful Chinese hard SciFi, and every self respecting Chinese nerd has read it. It's a fascinating story, and has a lot of Chinese culture and history mixed in as well.

Re: Show HN: Learn Chinese Through Novels

#13

Post by jliechti1 »

I've done my own manual version of this kind of service to learn Chinese. Would definitely pay for something like this!

The biggest problem for me is the availability of Chinese audio books (specifically, non-abridged versions - anyone have recommended sources?) When your reading level is high enough to read novels, the English translation is no longer that important - if I could just get the Chinese audio and text I would be really happy. It looks like this is targeted at beginners. Not sure how helpful it will be for them, but I see a lot of potential for more intermediate/advanced learners. There's always that gap in language learning between text books and real texts that has to be overcome. I think this kind of service could be great for that.

Right now I'm reading Tian Long Ba Bu (天龍八部), and have gone through the first 200 pages like this (simultaneous reading/listening), and it's been really helpful.

Also, a feature request: give an option to display the text in Traditional or Simplified Chinese. There are browser extension to use this, but it'd me more convenient to not have to use it on every page.

Re: Show HN: Learn Chinese Through Novels

#14

Post by imron »

If anyone is looking for a similar tool that works with any Chinese content you like, and is performant even for long texts, you might be interested in my Chinese Text Analyser: http://www.chinesetextanalyser.com/

It also remembers words you know and don't know and can give you an approximation of how well you'll know a given piece of text before you start reading it (once it has a fair idea of your vocabulary).

Currently Windows only, but it runs under Wine on Linux and an OSX version will be ready soon.

Re: Show HN: Learn Chinese Through Novels

#15

Post by erjiang »

laowushi wrote: post #9

看起来不错。有一个小问题：favicon不是一个正式的汉字，只是一个偏旁部首。

I don't know what the creators' intentions were regarding the favicon. It is, however, the katakana "chi" (チ), which corresponds to the name "Chicory". Seems bizarre, but that's the connection I saw.

Re: Show HN: Learn Chinese Through Novels

#16

Post by mojoe »

About a month ago I posted about a great science fiction book that was recently translated from Mandarin to English (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8607914). It would be amazing if this tool could incorporate content like "The Three-Body Problem." I realize that international publishing rights is a complex subject to tackle, which is probably why "the True Story of Ah Q" was chosen for this initial release (it's in the public domain, or at least it looks like the english version is: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lu-xun/1921/12/ah-q/). However, as many others have commented, this great tool will probably not be used much without great content.

Re: Show HN: Learn Chinese Through Novels

#17

Post by mojoe »

imron wrote: post #14

If anyone is looking for a similar tool that works with any Chinese content you like, and is performant even for long texts, you might be interested in my Chinese Text Analyser: http://www.chinesetextanalyser.com/ It also remembers words you know and don't know and can give you an approximation of how well you'll know a given piece of text before you start reading it (once it has a fair idea of your vocabulary). Curr…

This looks like a great tool. I have two questions:

1. Can it translate characters to pinyin? I can speak more Mandarin than I can read, so being able to see phonetics would be really useful to me.

2. Do you know of any online stores that sell DRM-free Mandarin ebooks that could be used with your tool?

Re: Show HN: Learn Chinese Through Novels

#19

Post by imron »

mojoe wrote: post #17
imron wrote: post #14

If anyone is looking for a similar tool that works with any Chinese content you like, and is performant even for long texts, you might be interested in my Chinese Text Analyser: http://www.chinesetextanalyser.com/ It also remembers words you know and don't know and can give you an approximation of how well you'll know a given piece of text before you start reading it (once it has a fair idea of your vocabulary). Curr…

This looks like a great tool. I have two questions: 1. Can it translate characters to pinyin? I can speak more Mandarin than I can read, so being able to see phonetics would be really useful to me. 2. Do you know of any online stores that sell DRM-free Mandarin ebooks that could be used with your tool?

1) No, and partly on purpose. It's impossible to get 100% accuracy with automatic character->pinyin converters, and is very easy to get incorrect values even for common words and I believe this is a danger for new learners and so for the moment have not implemented this. At some point I hope to start creating curated content with the tool and that will be able to provide the full, correct pinyin.

In the meantime, it does have the ability to show pinyin definitions for individual words (rather than bulk conversion), and it can export tab-separated lists of all unknown/looked up words, including with pinyin, definition, sentences containing the word (with or without cloze deletion) and more, which can then be imported in a flashcard program such as Pleco or Anki.

2) I'm not sure off the top of my head of any Mandarin ebook stores, but this thread on Chinese-Forums has a few suggestions (some of which may now be out of date so check towards the end for more recent sources):

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/34090-best-so...

Post reply on HN