What are those apps you usually post in your productivity updates?
hi! here's a breakdown of apps i use, as well as websites and other resources i've used/use for my learning (mainly chinese, though some of these resources can be used for other languages as well).
apps i use every day:
dot languages: this is a chinese-specific app where you select your hsk level, and then read articles at that level. there's a pop-up dictionary, an option to show pinyin, post-article vocab practice (audio, matching, translation, and writing), and the option to have your articles either in simplified or traditional.
TOFU learn: a blend between flashcards and writing, you can find decks for various things, including hsk level-specific decks, and you learn new vocab with the stroke order and then write each new term three times—once with an overlay (so the term is visible), and then two times from memory. there's also a review function, which helps you practice terms you've already learnt, and each term has audio that goes with it. i use it for chinese, but there's decks for esperanto, french, german, italian, japanese, korean, norweigian, portuguese, russian, spanish, swedish, and turkish.
the pleco dictionary app: my favourite chinese dictionary app; allows you to translate from english to chinese or chinese to english, has options for writing, radical, vocal, and keyboard entry, and has both traditional and simplified characters.
ankiapp: this one's not particularly complicated; it's a flashcard app, where you can make your own decks or download decks other people have made. it uses a spaced repetition system to help you remember terms—you rate yourself from worst to best on how well you remembered the term, and that determines how many times it'll pop up afterwards. it also gives you an overall grade for each deck, which is a nice way to measure your progress.
duolingo: probably my least favourite of all of the apps i use; the chinese course isn't the best, and now that they've removed the notes/grammar information option, there's no way for people who aren't already fairly familiar with the language and its inner workings to learn them if they exclusively use duolingo. it's okay for maintenance practice, though, but i'm already almost finished with the entire course and i would say it barely reaches to lower hsk 4, so i wouldn't say it's a good tool if you're more advanced.
apps i have but use less often:
readibu: this is sort of like dot in that it's an app for reading in chinese with a pop-up dictionary. however, that's where the similarities end; readibu has novels, short stories, and articles aimed at children, and each of those are further split into genres. readibu also lets you add your own web-pages and read them on the app, so you can use its pop-up dictionary with them. it's aimed more to intermediate and upper intermediate learners, with hsk levels ranging from hsk 4 to hsk 6. the only reason i rate dot above readibu is because dot has a larger range of levels (hsk 1 through hsk 6 i believe? but it may go higher) and exercises built in to help you learn the vocab.
the chairman's bao: also a chinese reading app, though if you use the free version, you only get one sample article per hsk level (hsk 1 - hsk 6). i believe that every so often you get a new sample article for each level, but i'm not sure what the interval on that is. it also has a pop-up dictionary and a flashcard option for saved vocab.
du chinese: another chinese reading app; it has articles divided into newbie through master (six levels in total, though they don't line up perfectly with the hsk in my experience), and new articles are free for a certain period of time before becoming locked behind a paywall. there's a pop-up dictionary and a vocab review/test option for vocab you save.
memrise: flashcards with audio, depending on whether you're using an official course or a user-generated deck. decent, but it can get repetitive.
hellotalk: not exclusively chinese, but i believe it started off mainly aimed that way. you set your language, and then your target language, and then you can talk to native speakers who have your language as their target language. potentially incredibly useful, but if you're like me and extremely introverted you may have a hard time using this app, since it requires a lot of one-on-one interaction.
slowly: i haven't actually gotten around to using this, but it's sort of like a digital penpal app, as i understand it. you can learn more about it here.
websites and other miscellanea:
this massive mega drive by @salvadorbonaparte (languages, linguistics, translation studies, and more).
this masterpost by @loveletter2you (linguistics, languages, and language learning books/textbooks).
this masterpost on chinese minority literature by @zaobitouguang
the integrated chinese textbooks by cheng and tsui, which are the textbooks i use for self-study—there's textbooks and workbooks, as well as character workbooks (though these can easily be cut out without suffering from the loss).
mandarinbean: graded readers, hsk 1 - hsk 6, with a pop-up dictionary and the option to read in traditional or simplified
chinese reading practice: reading, beginner through advanced (three levels), with a pop-up dictionary and some additional notes included on vocab and language-specific things non-native speakers might struggle with or not know.
hsk reading: graded readers, hsk 1 - hsk 6, divided into three sections (beginner, intermediate, advanced). does not have a pop-up dictionary, but does have an option to translate the text, post-reading quizzes, and notes on important vocab with example sentences.
my chinese reading: reading from beginner to advanced (four levels); has a pop-up dictionary, the option to play an audio recording of the passage you're reading, notes on key words, things that are difficult to translate, grammar, and post-reading comprehension questions.
the heavenly path notion website, which i would say is one of the best resources i've ever found, with a massive number of guides, lists of chinese media in a variety of forms, and general resources.
chinese character stroke order dictionary: what it says on the tin; will show you the stroke order for a given character.
hanzigrids: allows you to generate your own character worksheets. i use this very frequently, and can recommend it. the only downside is if you want to create multiple pages at once, you have to pay; however this can easily be circumnavigated by creating only one sheet at a time. you can download the sheet as a pdf and print it out for personal use.
21st century chinese poety: a resource i only came across recently; has a massive collection of contemporary chinese poetry, including translations; much more approachable than classical poetry, which can often be incredibly dense and hard to parse due to the writing style.
zhongwen pop-up dictionary: if you're reading something in chinese on a website that doesn't have a pop-up dictionary, this is a must. i've never encountered any words that it doesn't have a translation for so far, including colloquialisms/slang. i use it to read webnovels, and it's been a fantastic tool. you can also save vocab by hitting the r key when you're hovering over a word/phrase, making it easy to go back and add terms to your flashcard deck(s).
chinese reading world: a website put together by the university of iowa; split into three levels (beginner, intermediate, and advanced), with thirty units per level, and ten modules per unit, as well as multiple proficiency tests per level. each module is split into three parts: a pre-reading vocab quiz, the reading with a number of comprehension questions based on it, and a post-vocab reading quiz. it also rates you in relation to someone with a native proficiency based on how quickly you read and answer the comprehension questions, and how many vocab questions you get right.
jiaoyu baike: an extensive chinese-to-chinese dictionary, put out by the taiwanese ministry of education. you can find an extensive write-up on it here, by @linghxr.
social media etc: see this post by @rongzhi.
qianpian: another chinese-to-chinese dictionary; @ruhua-langblr has a write-up on it here.
this writeup on zero to hero by @meichenxi; initially aimed at chinese learning, but now has expanded greatly.
music rec's: this masterpost by @linghxr.
tv/film: youtube is a great place to find chinese tv shows and films, and they often have english subtitles. if you can't find something on there, though, you can probably find it either on iqiyi or asianvote, which have both chinese and other asian shows and films (though you'll want an adblock if you're going to use the latter). i use these a lot to watch things, and have discovered a lot of media through these, and then novels through those when i went searching to see what they were adapted from.
polylogger: a website for logging the amount of time/type of language study you do. has a wide variety of languages, and the option to follow other people. still, it's a fairly basic site.
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Took me four hours but I was able to convert and format a Mandarin epub to include pinyin notation above the text:
Technical details below for anyone interested
I was trying to do this on my personal laptop, which is, unfortunately, Windows. I found two GitHub projects that looked promising: pinyin2epub and epub-with-pinyin and spent most of my time trying to get python to work. I wasn't able to get the second project to work, but I was eventually able to get some output with the pinyin2epub project.
The output was super messy though, with each word appearing on a different line. The script output the new ePub where all the tags that encapsulated every word and pinyin were on a new line, as well as having a ton of extra spacing.
I downloaded Calibre and edited the epub. With the help of regex search and replace I was able to adjust the formatting to what is shown in the picture above.
All in all, I'm fairly happy with it although it does fail to load correctly in any mobile ePub reader I've tried so far ( I have an Android). I think it's the <ruby> tags are either unsupported or cause a processing error entirely depending on the app.
Once I have motivation again I'd love to try to combine the original text epub with a translated epub. My idea here is that there would be a line of the original text above followed by a line of the translate text so on and so forth. I'd probably need to script something for this, maybe it could look for paragraph tags and alternate from two input files. I'd have to think about it a bit more though.
Unfortunately my Mandarin isn't yet strong enough to read the novels I'm interested in entirely in the original language, but I'd love to be able to quickly reference the original text to see what word or character they used, or how a phrase is composed
Feel free to ask if you want to try to do this and need any clarification. The crappy screenshot and lack of links because I'm on my phone and lazy.
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STRANGER THINGS IN CHINESE -VOCAB LIST
so... i was bored and wanted to find some vocab list about stranger things in chinese but i couldn't find any... so I finally decided to go look for it myself on diverse chinese speaking websites who were talking about the show. I also used pleco for some more generic words usefull to speak about the show.
I hope some other people will also fit on my venn diagram of hyperfixation and find this list useful ^^
怪奇物語(guài qí wù yǔ)stranger things
颠倒世界(diān dǎo shì jiè)the upside down
夺心魔 (duó xīn mó)the mind flayer
魔狗 (mó gǒu) demodog
魔王 (mó wáng) demogorgon
魔蝙蝠 (mó biān fú) demobat
藤蔓 (téng wàn) the vines
怪兽 (guài shòu) the monster
维克那 (wéi kè nà) vecna
集体意识 (jí tǐ yì shí) the hive mind
火俱乐部 ( huǒ jù lè bù) the hellfire club
龙与地下城 (lóng yǔ dì xià chéng) dungeons and dragons
棒球棒 (bàng qiú bàng) baseball bat
圣诞灯 (shèng dàn dēng) christmas lights
纹身 (wén shēn) tattoo
��踪 (shī zōng) disappearance
杀 (shā) to kill
心灵感应 (xīn líng gǎn yīng) telekinesis
读心术 (dú xīn shù) telepathy
打电话 (dǎ diàn huà) to make a phone call
摩尔斯电码 (mó ěr sī diàn mǎ) morse code
对讲机 (duì jiǎng jī) walkie-talkie
俄国间谍 (é guó jiān dié) russian spy
实验品 (shí yàn pǐn) human experiment
星庭商场 (xīng tíng shāng cháng) starcourt mall
霍金斯实验室 ( huò jīn sī shí yàn shì) hawkins lab
门 (mén) the gate
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