Discussion

macroraptor

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

wren6991: > I decided to go against the grain of the near-universal advice to "learn to read by reading"....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.

yorwba: > A guy on a forum had hired a calligrapher to write three thousand characters in ballpoint penA shame that this amazing resource is not linked.

kdheiwns: This is a hilariously common thing with studiers of Asian languages. There are countless posts with people spending years, even more than a decade, just trying to memorize every single kanji and how to write it before even beginning vocabulary or basic grammar, then lamenting how difficult the language is and how they can't pass kindergarten level tests. So then they spend loads of money on apps, make custom tools, and find countless other ways to burn time.Meanwhile others read books and get pretty good at their language of choice in a couple years.

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.

pjc50: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47804903 - they can speak it, but not read it.

pjc50: Note on why this person is taking an unusual route: from https://blog.kevinzwu.com/cyborg-learning/ , 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 read it.

alex_c: Did you read part 3? Doesn’t sound like “avoiding hard things” is really a problem for the author :)https://blog.kevinzwu.com/symbolhead-syndrome/

ramon156: > I opened Claude Code and started rambling into my mic. It wrote thousands of lines of questionably efficient JavaScript. I didn't read a single one.Hm. I always knew voice mode was a thing, but I have never tried it. What's people's experience with it?Being able to correct my words is a good thing. Hell, I did it ~3 times when writing this comment. I can't do that when I'm rambling. I'll trip, or CC will think I'm finished.

maenbalja: I liked the 10% @@@ example, demonstrated their point pretty well.Also for anyone who speaks or is currently learning Chinese... I've been working on a multiplayer CJK word game that shares a similar efficient brute force style of learning to the author's approach (although presented via gameplay instead of tooling). Every turn you get a random character and must type in a word that contains the char in ANY position. If you like fast paced word games it might be up your alley: https://danobang.com/?game_lang=cmn