I built Mandarin Melon (mandarin-melon.com) to scratch an itch as a Chinese learner.

I've found with language learning that I learn best when I'm getting a lot of high quality comprehensible input. Reading, listening, watching videos. But since my Chinese isn't great, it's kinda hard to find content that is at my level, and is actually engaging. A lot of people give advice like "watch Peppa Pig in Chinese", but IMO, Peppa Pig is not particularly beginner friendly and is also really boring. For reading, similarly, graded readers can target a specific reading level and are really useful, but get boring fast.

On the other hand, social media is about the ultimate form of engaging content. But as an intermediate learner, I quickly get lost trying to use actual Chinese social media platforms, scrolling without really understanding enough to be learning.

So I built Mandarin Melon as a way to read social media posts that use only the characters you've already studied.

(1.) Textbook vocabulary tailored feeds - If you study with the standard HSK textbooks, this creates a tailored feed using just characters you already know. For example, if you're at HSK level 3 here is a collection of 56,000+ posts that only use characters from HSK 3 and below: (https://mandarin-melon.com/bylist/hsk-old?level=3&atLevel=2&...). You can also choose to introduce posts with 1-3 characters you don't know, to push your learning and expand the base of posts to browse.

(2.) A mode for new learners (https://mandarin-melon.com/learn/onebyone/0) - In this mode, characters are introduced one-by-one, with definitions / pronunciations for the new character. The characters you learn are ordered such that each new character maximizes the number of new posts you can read by learning it. This wouldn't be a good way to learn Chinese on its own, but would be fun for a new learner to dip their toes into Chinese social media.

Personally I'm using the app most days. I find the bite-sized bits of content / learning a really motivating way to keep up my daily Chinese practice. I also find the little stories of peoples posts really fun and natural in a way that textbooks / graded readers are not.

If there are any Chinese language learners, or folks interested in Chinese social media, I'd love to hear thoughts / feedback. Thanks for checking it out!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47522093

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

If I found out a player had come to the table with an LLM generated character, I would feel a pretty big betrayal of trust. It doesn't matter to me how "good" or "polished" their ideas are, what matters is that they are their own.

Similarly, I would be betraying my players by using an LLM to generate content for our shared game. I'm not just an officiant of rules, I'm participating in shared storytelling.

I'm sure there are people who play DnD for reasons other than storytelling, and I'm totally fine with that. But for storytelling in particular, I think LLM content is a terrible idea.

> "What does 'LOQ' mean in your results? > > Limit of Quantification (LOQ) is the lowest concentration we can reliably measure. Results below LOQ are marked "IMO this definition should be on every results page, since most of the pages have more LOQs than anything else.

1. An American company benefited from their labor

2. American consumers benefited from the goods / services they contributed to providing

3. American citizens benefited from the services provided by the taxes they pay

4. Other American businesses benefited from their patronage

You read this quote wrong. Senior devs outsource _work_ to junior engineers, not _understanding_. The way they became senior in the first place is by not outsourcing work so they could develop their understanding.

I don't think that's totally fair in this case, since it seems they open sourced their software. But also, in general, I think NIH syndrom gets a bad rap. Sometimes a "worse" solution you control really is more reasonable compared to a technically superior solution made by an external company.

Also I was very confused by the assertion that ebooks are a niche market. By the authors math more than 20% of people in the UK use e-readers to read on a regular basis. That seems like a very healthy market to me!

Or even easier: `help(function_name)`!

I don't want any language where they get to insert themselves into that chain of behavior. Curl doesn't need a TOS, why does Firefox?

It's a bit like the SEO dance. Publishing the exact formula makes it much easier to game SEO, so instead search engines say stuff like "we're trying to gauge the overall quality of the site, we use metrics like [...] but not exclusively, focus on making good, responsive, accessible content above all else". Obviously it doesn't work perfectly and the more money there is, the more incentive to game the system, but it seems better than the alternative of publishing the exact ranking algorithm.

1. Publishing the exact formula for funding is great for transparency, but then leads to an incentive to game the system to capture funding. Doing things like breaking your project up into many small packages, or reducing the number of maintainers are not good for the ecosystem but may lead to more funding. Also, there starts to be an incentive to juice download numbers.

2. In general, rewarding "risk" with additional funding seems like it creates an adverse incentive. This seems like a really tricky problem, because lack of funding is a major source of risk. It seems like there could be a pendulum effect here if you're not careful. Is there a way to structure the funding so it encourages long term "de-risking"?