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Show HN: An “automatic” way to learn Chinese (play.google.com)
57 points by wilonth on Nov 15, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 38 comments



Enjoying the lessons and really liking the idea of the vocabulary rank, that's probably something that would keep me using the app daily.

Some Feedback:

Is there a way to turn off the sound? At the moment it automatically repeats any answer I select which would stop me from using it on the train to work.

Also when I started practice, went away and started practice again the practice questions seem to freeze after one question.


Thanks a lot for the feedback, I'll fix the issues as soon as I have the time.


Update: The app now has a way to turn off the sound in the last (settings) tab.


Also worth checking out is https://www.clozemaster.com/, which is centered around this idea of "sentence mining" and has a very polished interface.

I'm interested in seeing how this compares to it.


I'm trying it out, and am pretty excited. Nice work! This should help a lot with out-of-HSK vocabulary for me (I'm studying for the HSK using traditional materials/anki).

It'd be helpful for me to see the character in a much larger font somehow, perhaps even with stroke order, because I don't know how to write every radical correctly yet and at that font size can't necessarily recognize them all. For example, 蟹 was a new one I got and if I increase the font size, I can figure out there's 角, 刀, 牛, 虫, but not at the font size currently in the app. I also like to practice writing the characters to reinforce (which I'll do on paper, but still need to see what it's made up of).


Thanks for checking out, I'll definitely look into the font size issue. I would also want the writing feature myself but just haven't got around to implementing it, hard to figure out where to put it too.


I have no idea how many others like me there are out there, but if you could make a pinyin-only setting that would be really cool. I'm learning mandarin but not learning characters and it makes of a lot of study apps non-useful to me if they only use hanzi.


I think you should try learning the characters for once, maybe this time you won't have so much difficulty remembering them.


This feels uncharitable. Pinyin is a lot easier to learn coming from a western background. It's also used by many people as the primary input method for typing, and it's reasonable that the parent poster might not have a current need to learn characters. There's no reason to shame people for learning.


I certainly have no intention of shaming or talking him down, just trying to suggest an option, if it comes across that way, my bad.


It's like Anki but with a nicer UI, dynamic questions and progress tracking. Nice!


I'd love to use your app (even pay for it) if you ever get it out on iOS!


There seems to be a maximum length on the email address field when registering? (32 characters) My email address is longer than that.

After registering (with a different email :)) the sound didn't seem to work.


Cool! I basically completed the Duolingo course, which I loved but whose vocabulary is a bit limited. I was just wondering where to go next, so I could really use this.

Do you have plans to ever release this on ios?


The ios version is actually ready right now, I'm just putting off filling the "paperwork" and some tiny fixes. You can try it out through expo: https://expo.io/@haint/autolang-zh


When you click on the underlined blank, it opens the dictionary and gives you the answer. Not sure if that's an I feature


Oops that's a bug, thanks for spotting.


Is English interface available on iOS ? I see only Vietnamese interface by default.


Oops my mistake, I'll push out an update soon.


Isn't it a little too much for small app?

https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/reports/40782/


The app uses Expo, those libraries just come with Expo by default and can't be excluded, but they are unused and not enabled. Only Google Analytics is in use.


Will this app cost money in the future? (I'm ok if it does, I just want to know before if it becomes an expensive subscription service or a reasonable one time payment)


I don't have a long term plan but I can assure you that it won't ever be expensive (I'm from a third world country anyways) and early adopters today will never be charged. It's going to be free for a long while though.


is china promoting those apps? android has a dozen with million of downloads (and very good quality) but all started less than a year ago.


Not sure what those apps are but I'm not from China and actually started coding this app to learn Chinese myself.


what is your fluency? do you speak chinese every day? i am just curious about the accuracy of the app's contents. :) thanks for posting this.


Don't worry the contents are all automatically generated from example data (Tatoeba) and the dictionary, nothing is hand crafted. I sure wouldn't trust myself writing correct Chinese sentences hehe.


What are those recent apps?


I just tried to create an account but clicking the 'create an account' button doesn't work


That's strange, haven't heard of such an issue. What's your device and android version? You can try reinstalling the app or test it on another phone.


Any plans on doing the same for japanese? At least for Hiragana and Katakana? Would be pretty neat!


No plans for now, I'm having a bit too much to work on atm, no teammates :(


hi, do you have your other app (autolang "english") in other languages than vietnamese ?

and second question, why forcing a registration from the beginning ?


Unfortunately none at the moment. For the second question, it's just the simplest, most straightforward design to me.


Also worth checking: Skritter.com


Who want to invest in China, contact me.


Very nice. Will be using this for HSK prep if it's possible to choose vocabulary from different HSK levels. Does it allow for that?


Not for now, it only has a calibration quiz on entry to find out where you are in the vocabulary by-character rank (that probably correlates with HSK levels somehow) and start from there.




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