Chinese on jeffcarp

Deciding between a static and dynamic site

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Hi, I’m trying to blog more this year. Maybe not every day, but more frequently.

In a recent post I mentioned I’ve been working on a fast frontend for a Chinese-English dictionary. In the spirit of “blog about what you’ve struggled with”, the biggest challenge I’m currently facing is choosing between designing the site as front-end heavy or back-end heavy.

I’ve written two initial versions of the site: one as a fully static website and one as a fully backend app in Go. Despite the server-side version being written in Go, I’m not super happy with the load time of the app. Even when the server is warmed up, the initial document load time is 30-40ms, whereas the static site is 10-20ms.

Considering File Formats for ChineseDict

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I’ve been hacking on ChineseDict, a fast web frontend to look up Chinese words. I started the project originally to fulfill a specific use case: when practicing chatting with friends or watching a video, I need search results in milliseconds, not seconds.

The website uses the CC-EDICT dictionary to power the results. I now want to expand each term with examples and extra data in a way that’s easy to store on disk and update via git commit.

The Most Commonly Used Chinese Words

Sun, 15 Mar 2020 15:23:36 -0700

I think the most effective way to learn a language is to prioritize learning the day-to-day most frequently used words. Picking words to study in order of frequency is the optimal way to maximally increase your marginal understanding of the language for each successive word you learn.

To that end, I took a dataset of Weibo (China’s Twitter) posts and ranked all words that appeared in the dataset order of frequency.

Measuring My Chinese Progress

Sat, 27 Apr 2019 22:20:24 -0700

Last summer I started learning Mandarin Chinese. To start I began taking classes at a Chinese language school in SF. For more practice I started an Instagram @jeffcarp_zh and tried writing a couple blog posts.

Almost a year later, I’m still going to Chinese class on a semi-regular basis (1 hour a week except when I’m taking a break) and keep up a daily spaced-repetition flashcard habit using the Pleco Chinese dictionary app (usually on the train into work).

More Similar Mandarin Words

Sat, 20 Oct 2018 01:24:10 +0000

大家好，今天我要写一下更多相似的中文话。我的上次的blog post是英文写的 Similar Mandarin Words。下面是更同类的单词我遇到了在学中文。

“去” 和 “走”

都可以用去某处。“走”的意思是physically walk somewhere。去是more general。

“方才” 和 “刚才”

在词典方才和刚才都有同的意思。但是没有人说方才。人人用刚才。

“很有意思” 和 “很有趣”

都是同的意思。很有意思还有可能用sarcastically。

“见到”，“看到”, 或者 “看”，那个用？

看只是to see的意思。见到是看某人的意思。看到的意思是to notice。也可以是看某人的意思但是

再次谢谢Elva给教学我中文很好。

Some Similar Mandarin Words

Sat, 23 Jun 2018 01:02:51 -0700

This year I’m trying to start learning Mandarin Chinese. Here are some confusingly similar words I’ve come across.

认识 and 知道

The difference is between knowing a person, 认识 (rènshí) and knowing a fact, 知道 (zhīdào).

你认识她妈?	你知道我很酷吗？
nǐ rènshí tā mā	nǐ zhīdào wǒ hěn kù mā
Do you know her?	Do you know I'm cool?

正在 and 现在

Both roughly mean “now” but 正在 (zhèngzài) means currently or in general and 现在 (xiànzài) means literally right at this moment.