Is there a good way to generate word lists for books ahead of time?

[jco]

I think this would be a particularly effective way to tackle reading. For example, let's say that at some point I want to tackle 三国演义. It'd be super awesome if ahead of time, I could generate a list of all of the words in the book, and then could study them in Anki/Skritter/etc, so that when I read the book I at least will have a much more grounded sense of the vocabulary.

 

Does anyone a) know if such lists exist for famous works? Really any book would be nice, classics or modern stuff alike b) know of a good way to generate such lists?

[imron]

Yes there is.

 

I wrote a program called Chinese Text Analyser which does exactly that.  It also keeps track of your known vocabulary over time so you can do things like generate lists of only the unknown words in novel.

 

Once it has built up sufficient knowledge of your vocabulary you can also use the program to compare the relative difficulties of two (or more) texts based on the total number of unknown words.  So for example if you are undecided which of several books you should read first, you can load electronic copies of each book in CTA and see which one has the fewest unknown words.

[somethingfunny]

Brilliant.  I bet you love it when this happens imron.

[jco]

That's awesome, imron! I'll be buying that for sure

[imron]

4 hours ago, somethingfunny said:

I bet you love it when this happens imron.

I do :-)

[jco]

It's a great tool! Does exactly what I need, and does it with style. Now to figure out a nicer way to bulk input into skritter... pasting 200 words at a time is very tedious.

 

Oh, I should note: the paypal checkout failed. I thought I pasted the error into here but I guess I did not.

[imron]

1 hour ago, jco said:

the paypal checkout failed.

Thanks for the heads-up.  It seems I missed my notification to renew my paypal certificates.  Edit: and this is now fixed

 

1 hour ago, jco said:

Now to figure out a nicer way to bulk input into skritter... pasting 200 words at a time is very tedious.

Skritter API integration is way down on my list of things todo.  In the meantime if you know python, someone wrote a python wrapper around the API that apparently lets you bulk upload vocab lists.  I haven't tested it, and the project hasn't been updated in years, but it might be a good place to start.