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Want to Learn Chinese?
Try Reading Social Media.

Welcome to [TODO: name]. We built a few experiements to help Chinese learners get comprehensible input from real Chinese social media posts.

If you want dive straight in to reading chinese social media posts, try one of these. Or scroll down to learn more.

Comprehensible Social Media

Social media can be really fun and engaging, so it makes sense to use it for language learning. If you're going to be scrolling, why not use that time to learn Chinese?

But if you tried this on the social media sites themselves, you've probably found there are pros and cons.

Social media is great for comprehensible input because:

  • Written by native speakers
  • Using real-life vocab & grammar
  • Bite-sized bursts of learning

But it can be challenging for new or even intermediate learners because:

  • Native speakers use a lot of hard words
  • Finding users to follow can be difficult
  • Social media sites are tailored for posting, not learning

THIS APP provides two new learning experiences powered by social media posts. Both:

  • Show you real social media posts
  • Adjust content based on you level
  • Help you pick up new words and characters

Experience 1
Vocab Tailored Feeds

Wouldn't it be great to read posts that only use characters from HSK 1 & HSK 2? Or only characters from the first 30 levels of Hanly? Tailored Feeds is exactly that.

So far we support vocab lists from the following sources. With more comming soon.

  • HSK (new and old)
  • Hanly
  • Integrated Chinese

We also support allowing one or more "above level" characters broaden the available posts and start stretching.

Experience 2
Learn Chinese from scratch, taught by Netizens

This experimental tool tries to answer the question: Can you learn chinese just from reading social media posts, starting from just a single character?

This experiment starts by selecting the single character which chinese social media posters used the most as a standalone post. Then, a second character is added, whichever unlocks the most additional posts. Then a third, and so on.

With each new character you learn, we only show posts that include that character so you get practice using it. We never include any posts using characters you haven't learned yet. But, as you learn more new characters, old characters will get used in new ways.

Each new character you learn in this experiment unlocks hundreds of new posts that you can read.

Is this a good idea? Probably not! But it is fun!

In addition to the one-by-one character approach described above, we have a couple different character orders that use a similar concept but present characters in different orders.

Analysis: Effective Vocab for Posts

Curious what vocab list gets you reading posts the fastest?

We have a couple pages that break down the relative usefulness of the vocabulary taught by different sources.

This isn't to say that one source is better than the others, since social media is a very particular corpus. But some of the differences may surprise you.

Want More?

I'm working on a number of projects to help you learn Chinese. If you liked this project, join my mailing list. I promise I'll only ever send an email if there's something actually cool to share. No spam.

Or if you'd like to get in touch, reach out here: PUT IN AN EMAIL