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Show HN: Learning Chinese and Japanese with graphs and trees (github.com)

9 points by mreichhoff ↗ HN
Just for fun, I built a language learning tool. It represents Chinese and Japanese as graphs of characters, with connections indicating given characters can form a word. It can also decompose characters to give clues on how they're pronounced, analyzes words to understand which ones are commonly used together, and more.

It's fully interactive, supports offline use, generates flashcards, has sentences from humans and from AI, and plenty of other features.

Check out the README for details. https://github.com/mreichhoff/HanziGraph

4 comments

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This is wonderful! Just last night I realized I had a need for something like this, while using the "words containing" feature of Pleco. I find I can remember characters much better if I see their relationship to other characters. Then I recognized hey this is a graph, that would be a cool thing to play with.

I learned intermediate level Chinese 40 years ago, back when paper dictionaries with pinyin were the hot new thing. Then I forgot it all. I recently stumbled across Pleco, which astonished me so much I started learning Chinese again.

I'm looking forward to using HanziGraph in my studying.

mreichhoff
ah, the "words containing" concept was pretty much how I ended up deciding to make this.

Thanks for the note and best of luck with your studying! Feel free to ping with any bugs, etc.

barlog
FYI: Japanese people don't read 漢字 (kanji) as "hanzi".
mreichhoff
yep, I know that, and originally had an entirely separate repo on GitHub for the Japanese version, but I tried to consolidate to just one for simplicity.

I also use a different domain name for the Japanese version, although I found some app that had taken the kanjigraph name, so I ended up using the much worse japanesegraph. Sorry about that