Paste in some parallel text (e.g. Bible verses, movie subtitles, song lyrics) and read what Farsi you can on the first line, looking to the lower lines for clues if you get stuck.
The core version of Pingtype is for traditional Chinese, but it supports a few other languages too.
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.
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.
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.
Matrix is just a visualisation tool, I never actually found a practical use for it other than looking cool.
The decomposition feature is at the bottom of the page below the generated HTML. It's the text box with "隹" and a Search button. Clicking Search will show the 2 parts of the character, and all characters that contain that radical (䧶, 䳡, etc), and all multi-character words containing that character.
Clicking any of the related characters (or numeric codes for radicals that don't have a Unicode representation) will then show the genealogy for that character.
See "copying from images" in http://localhost/pingtype/docs/docs.html
If I ever come to Berlin then your meetup sounds fun! I'm pretty far away though; I live in New Zealand now.
All the best with your learning, I hope you keep making progress!
Woah that looks like you could use it as a tool for doing live shows/streams. Very cool. Have always wanted to learn more about OBS Studio's similar functionality.
That included the artist location, allowing me to tag songs based on their country. I then created playlists such as "NERAS" Non-English Rock Artist Sample, where the one most popular song for a particular artist was chosen, and only when the country of origin was not English-speaking, and the genre was Rock. I like listening to music while working, but English lyrics distract me because I understand what they're saying.
After discovering music via the MySpace archive, I've since purchased 73 songs from 35 artists that I'd never heard of before digging into the data. I rebuilt my playlist on Spotify, but got greyed out tracks, and YouTube Music, but got "unavailable video". So I still prefer purchasing tracks via the iTunes Music Store, Qobuz, Bandcamp, and 7digital.
Other data sources such as the MP3.com rescue barge, PureVolume archive, and Anna's Spotify archive lack the country-of-origin metadata, so are of less interest to me. It may be possible to use an LLM to guess the language of each track title, but someone else will have to do that.
Meanwhile, if you're interested in the genre-by-country MySpace data, or have questions about the iTunes EPF, feel free to reach out and we can discuss your research.
> Other data sources such as the MP3.com rescue barge, PureVolume archive, and Anna's Spotify archive lack the country-of-origin metadata, so are of less interest to me. It may be possible to use an LLM to guess the language of each track title, but someone else will have to do that.
I would guess that combining these sources, along with info from MusicBrainz, would help quite a bit? Still, I'm rather surprised Spotify doesn't provide more information about artists.
After a concert in London, I missed the last train back to Lancaster. So I made a sign saying that I was on CouchSurfing, and some strangers invited me over!
After CouchSurfing started charging a monthly fee, I’ve defected to BeWelcome.org which is a European, open-source alternative to CS.
Was that the Archive.org HTML files, or did you find a source of PureVolume MP3 files?
Either way I'm interested; I did some independent research into the MySpace Dragon Hoard for non-English music, and discovered bands through there that I've since supported on Bandcamp and iTunes.
I went through a bunch of HTML pages, but most didn’t have much worth keeping. The main .warc I pulled had a ton of profiles and other data, though it looks like most of the site didn’t get scraped in time. I managed to extract 63,993 songs from the various .warc files. If you’ve got a way to reach you (Twitter or email works), I can share the torrent and instructions on how to rebuild and sift through everything.
If anybody is interested in beta app testing, I’m happy to invite you to the BeWelcome.org iOS app!
Currently it’s just a PWA, but we’re trying to keep it simple so it can get onto the App Store.
I was a big fan of CouchSurfing before they started charging a monthly fee, which is a similar gripe I have with Servas. I met my girlfriend at the CS meet up in Kaohsiung, and although I’m no longer able to help, BeWelcome has several ways to volunteer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System
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