I think this is a good time for a shameless plug. The last 2 month or so I am working on my own project [1] for learning more characters. I have made a tool with powerful search function, training mode, and other useful features, such as displaying plots that show you your progress and whether you are reaching your daily training goal, and the ability to save searches, a la Thunderbird saved filters. It is written in Python and oldschool tkinter with custom widgets for a somewhat more modern and capable feel. It is very configurable. Though currently configuring it means touching a JSON file, as I have not yet bothered writing GUI for that.

I am mostly developing this for myself, to have the perfect tool for me, but I dare say, that I have not seen anything comparable and that I let my 10y+ experience in learning Chinese influence my design decisions. Oh, and it is free /libre software of course (AGPL). It comes with an ever improving vocabulary file that has tons of metadata about words, their usage, how to memorize them, etc. under ODbL (open database license).

[1]: https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/xiaolong-dictionary

▲ peterburkimsher 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Good to see that there are others learning and creating! Another shameless plug for my translator site: https://pingtype.github.io

It takes text, adds colours for tones, pinyin, literal, and parallel translations.

There’s also a character decomposition tool at the bottom of the page which can be helpful if you’re able to recognise half a character but can’t remember the pronunciation for typing it.

The YouTube channel has some song lyrics, movie subtitles, and audio Bible that might help with learning.

	▲	zelphirkalt 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Also I just read some of your blog about learning Chinese :) Haha, I can totally relate to some of it. What I noticed is, that when I speak Mandarin with locals (on vacation, because I am not living there), they are always super happy, that I speak their language and they make an effort to speak it with me. This might be dependent on the region one is in. From your writing I would guess you might be in Taiwan or HK, and while I have been in HK, I have never been in Taiwan and I don't know how people handle it there. I have mostly been in southern China and it's always been great and an overwhelming amount of people were very friendly and welcoming. Of course living there and traveling there for a while are 2 different things and experience might differ. If you happen to visit Berlin, feel welcome to visit our Chinese language meetup (https://dragon-descendants.de/en/) and if you want you can ask for me, 小龙.
	▲	zelphirkalt 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Wow, the tool for decomposing characters is very cool! I assume you are talking about the thing that appears, when I click "Matrix"? I think it would be good to have "decompose characters" somewhere. But I might actually use this to get the component characters. In my app in my vocabulary file I also have tags for words, which are like "component:<component here>", so that if one knows how parts of a character, one could also search for it, without knowing its pinyin, by searching for "tags contain component1 and contain component2 and ...". I might add more component tags using your tool. What I noticed though is, that some of the components don't seem to be like what I would expect to be shown as components. For example I tried the word 衣服 and 服 is shown to have the component "二". I guess one could see it that way, but some other dictionaries stop at 月 which itself is a component with set meaning (moon) and usage as radical (often for body parts). My favorite online normal dictionary for example: https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?page=worddict&wdrst=... (hover over 3 dots of character and click the button with the 字 and scissors to see decomposition) says: `服 = 月 + 𠬝𠬝 = 卩 + 又` If you go further, wouldn't you also have to decompose "二" into "一" and "一"? A Chinese teacher told me there are various approaches for decomposition, so this might not be a science or that rigorous, but I think consistency would then dictate, that you decompose "二" as well. I don't always agree fully with their decomposition either and usually I stop at any component, that still has meaning by itself, which can be pretty low level 1 or 2 strokes components already. For determining that, I also use information from a language school, which I copied into a repo: https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/language-learning/src/... "All radicals from their website". Also useful for memorizing the characters, if one can derive a mnemonic for a character from its components and their meaning. The advanced UI looks very complex, but I don't mind that. In fact it is quite cool! Just has some stuff I don't even know what it is about. I noticed, that once one toggles the advanced UI, I didn't find a way to toggle it back to simple again. Bookmarked!