Comment by englishcat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by englishcat | Hacker News Reader

This is quite a great idea, as a native Chinese speaker, i want to say this is the way very similar how we learned Chinese when we were kids.

On the other hand, the Chinese writing system is logographic (or ideographic), unlike the English system which is phonetic. The most basic characters, such as 日 (sun), 月 (moon), and 山 (mountain), are essentially graphics (or pictures) of the objects themselves. that makes them very suitable for being represented by images. The emoji you are using is also very good.

I believe this method should be very effective for beginners in Chinese. However, once you have mastered the basic Chinese characters, you can learn about the structure of Chinese characters and then continue reading more materials to expand your vocabulary.

The real challenge is to expand your vocabulary through extensive reading, i'm actually working on a tool to solve this specific problem (https://lingoku.ai/learn-chinese), If you are reading English, it will insert Chinese text for you, if your are reading Chinese text, it will translate the text from Chinese to English then inject Chinese words into the translated text, thus improving your vocabulary while reading.

checked out the tool and think it's a cool idea! one piece of feedback though - I actually feel like the inverse product would be more helpful for me. What I mean is replacing ~95% of english text with words (Chinese in my case) that I can understand, and leaving the remaining ~5% (words I definitely don't know) in English.

At least for me, there's large value in consuming bigger volumes of Chinese to get me used to pattern-matching on the characters, as opposed to only reading a smaller amount of harder characters that I'm less likely to actually encounter

That's a really cool concept. Naively replacing words might work, but sometimes the context is needed. Maybe a model like gemini 2.5 flash lite would be fast enough but still maintain better context awareness?

That makes a lot of sense, it really highlights the diffences in learning stages. My current tool if primarily designed for intermediate language learners who have already learned some basic words, but still in the 'accumulation phase' - their main bottleneck is vocabulary size, so they need to see new words frequently.

it sounds like you are at a more advanced stage of learning Chinese, you have moved past simple vocab building and are focusing on flow and fluency reading. For your use case, that 'inverse' approach (Chinese with English safety nets) is definitely superior for pattern-matching, it's a different problem set, but a very valid one.

Appreciate your feedback.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com