Note 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.
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
> 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.
> 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.
I 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.
Interesting 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
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
> 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.
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?
Note 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.
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
> 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.
> 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.
I 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.
> 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.
Interesting 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
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
> 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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47804903 - they can speak it, but not read it.
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?
Did you read part 3? Doesn’t sound like “avoiding hard things” is really a problem for the author :)
https://blog.kevinzwu.com/symbolhead-syndrome/