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Comment by giraffe_lady | Hacker News Reader

Are the chinese examples as legible as the english ones? The english transforms are comprehensible because only one letter was changed, if more or all were it would get difficult to understand.

To me it looks like proportionally more of the content-carrying form has been modified in the chinese. But I can't read chinese and so can't evaluate.

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Native Chinese speaker here. All transformations seem legit to me, the 兔/rabbit one was especially good since it is beautifully transformed, and I would say it still readable for a native speaker. For the 猫/cat and 冲浪/surfing cases, I feel like the transformation is too intentional, or less natural compared to the other cases (including the English ones). They are more readable though than 兔/rabbit.

I wonder if this can be used for automatically generating mnemonics for people learning Chinese characters.

(Not a native Chinese speaker). 兔/rabbit is marginal to me - I don't think I would even register it as a character unless it was in the right context. The others are perfectly legible. For the bold-face 猫/cat (the first one), you do technically lose some "content carrying form" as the 田 becomes a shape that does not appear in Chinese (sideways 曰), but I don't think that would actually confuse anyone in the context of the rest of the character.

In Japanese 田 is extremely common, meaning rice paddy, pronounced ta in names like Tanaka (田中, middle of rice paddy). It is simplified from the Chinese.

田 means field in Chinese. Also a very common radical (which should be absolutely unsurprising given that they're more or less the same character set).

the Chinese examples are legit. Though the example on the far right (冲浪) is a word comprises of two characters, which means surfing only when the word is read as a whole.

Also noted that that is simplified Chinese, used by mainland China, that is, well, simpler than traditional Chinese used in Taiwan and maybe Hong Kong. For instance, 冲浪 is written as 衝浪 in traditional Chinese, which is more complicated and I'm wondering how they handle it.

Cool, thanks for the info.

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