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ChineseLevel.com Intro


Herman

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Hi everyone! Some of you may have heard of ChineseLevel - it's been discussed here a couple of times. I'm the developer of that site, and I thought I'd just post here to introduce myself and ask for some feedback from you guys. 

 

I built ChineseLevel because I had reached a point in Chinese where newspapers were still way too difficult to read, and finding interesting content online (that I could actually understand) was tough. So I spent a couple of weekends a few years ago to build ChineseLevel, and pretty much left it unchanged from then on.

 

For a couple of months now though, I've been spending my free time on building a new (much improved) version. The goal is to have similar functionality, but have it more polished, and more integrated with your favorite Chinese sites. For one, the test for estimating your knowledge should be more accurate and should be re-usable to track your improvement over time :)

 

I'd be really happy to get any feedback from you on what you'd like to have in an app that aims to improve your Chinese reading ability (vocab, grammar and retention, not /just/ character knowledge) and keep track of your progress over time. What are your thoughts?

 

Thanks, and nice to meet you!

 

============

 

PS: For those of you who are developers...

 

ChineseLevel is an open source project, and in building ChineseLevel I'm also developing some open source tools for working with Chinese text. 

 

One library is called mafan, and it's a Python toolkit for segmenting text, checking punctuation, working with encodings and converting pinyin. There's also a reasonably new version written in Go primarily for segmenting Chinese text, called go-mafan.

 

Then there is the ChineseLevel API - it's still under heavy development, but this will be a super-fast and flexible API for estimating the difficulty of text, the definitions of words, getting users' knowledge, etc. It's completely open source but not quite ready for production use - I would suggest keeping an eye on this in the coming months or helping out if you're interested :)

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Thanks for the feedback! There are many, many, many bugs with the current version, like I said, I haven't worked on it in years... those will be addressed in the new version, but I'm not planning on making any changes to the current site, so you're going to be be stuck with it for a few more months. For the moment I'm interested not so much in what features are broken, but what features should/shouldn't be there in the first place. Any thoughts on that?

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I love the idea of the site and will mess around with 1.0 when more when I can :)

1.0 seems to work relatively well on mobile, but once I got past the test it turned to a bit of a mess with the recommendations. It would be nice to see 2.0 mobile optimized so that the recommendations are easier to browse and more organized ;)

It would also be nice to have the ability to register directly on your site and not through Facebook, Twitter, and google. Can't use any of these smoothly here behind the great firewall, so some guarantee to not have to take the diagnostics test on every visit would be nice.

I'm excited to see what you come up with!

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Can't use any of these smoothly here behind the great firewall,

 

Very good point, I never thought of that, thanks! I'll make sure to have an alternative for V2.0. 

 

It would be nice to see 2.0 mobile optimized 

 

That's definitely one of the goals with the complete redesign for V2.0: I'd almost go as far as saying it will be mobile-first this time round. I think mobile is really important too, because I selfishly want to use ChineseLevel while commuting on the train ;) 

 

Thanks for the great feedback!

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I'm glad you're working on version 2.0, because sadly version 1.0 does not work properly for me. Regardless of how many words I mark as unknown in the test, it gives me the same scores and the same recommendations. And as much as I would loooove to believe it, I know that I don't know 4000 Chinese words and would not be able to understand 79% of the content in a Chinese newspaper. I would really love if the site could give me actual recommendations suited to my level, or at least something I can work with having the knowledge of Chinese characters that I have. 

 

And I agree with others that it's extremely annoying to have to take the test every single time you enter the website. I know that for most people this might not be a problem, since everyone seems to have a Twitter or Facebook account and they don't care where they sign in using that, but I would prefer a separate login just for your website. 

 

I think the premises of the website is fantastic (which I mentioned in one of the earlier discussions about it), but it would be great if those two things I mentioned could be improved, otherwise the website is of no use to me.

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The site tested me on simplified, but all the suggested articles were in traditional. It's great to have support for both character sets on the test, but the results are effectively unusable for me if they don't use the character set I'm familiar with and want to practice.

 

Looks like a nice site with great potential, though.

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Hi Ania & Demonic_duck, 

Thanks for checking it out! Yeah, it sucks right now, so many bugs :(   It used to actually work better, in that the results and recommendations were more realistic and traditional/simplified was working fine, but over time some of the APIs I used have changed and it's drifted to become worse and worse. I'm considering just taking the current version offline completely until the new one is ready, maybe that will put some fire under me as well!

 

In any case, thanks a lot for the feedback, it's much appreciated and I'll make sure it's fixed in the upcoming version. Hope you'll check it out again then, I'll keep you posted!

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  • 3 months later...

I just had a go. The site tested me on three shorts texts. I knew all the words in all three. My result came up as "You know around 38,393 Chinese words. And should understand about 97% of vocab in a Chinese newspaper." Not sure if it's scientific, but there you go.

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  • 9 months later...
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Great idea, but unfortunately it doesn't work at all for me (tried both on FF and IE). When I validate what I know in the first text, a download bar appears but nothing more happens. Note that it might be due to my company's firewalll though (I'm currently at work).

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