中文 Literacy Speedrun II: Character Cyclotron
by surprisetalk on 4/13/2026, 12:28:35 PM
https://blog.kevinzwu.com/character-cyclotron/
Comments
by: pjc50
Note on why this person is taking an unusual route: from <a href="https://blog.kevinzwu.com/cyborg-learning/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.kevinzwu.com/cyborg-learning/</a> , 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 <i>read</i> it.<p>Edit addendum: <a href="https://blog.kevinzwu.com/chinese-cursed-logographic-dags/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.kevinzwu.com/chinese-cursed-logographic-dags/</a> 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.<p>There's an additional level of chaos when learning the "same" characters as kanji rather than hanzi.
4/17/2026, 11:51:05 AM
by: varnaud
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.
4/17/2026, 11:42:42 AM
by: yorwba
> A guy on a forum had hired a calligrapher to write three thousand characters in ballpoint pen<p>A shame that this amazing resource is not linked.
4/17/2026, 11:31:51 AM
by: calpaterson
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
4/17/2026, 11:06:31 AM
by: wren6991
> I decided to go against the grain of the near-universal advice to "learn to read by reading".<p>...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.
4/17/2026, 11:20:07 AM
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4/17/2026, 11:48:14 AM