Show HN: Math expressions and graph traversals of the Chinese language

3 points

a year ago

I've been working on a free Chinese language learning tool for awhile now. The main insight is that Chinese characters are used together to form words, and that this allows for a way of quickly getting information about related words and characters. By learning words and characters in a chain in this way, I've found it easier not to get lost in the long list of characters.

In addition, I've found it helpful to break down characters into their components to find pronunciation clues, which can sometimes be hidden in components of components.

The math feature uses a similar tree traversal mechanism to allow expressions like 酒-氵+各 = 酪 or 亻+寸+广+仌+⺆ = 腐.

As it's 2025, it also has some AI features. Notably: * allowlisted users can get Chinese or English text explanations that span more than just a word, but that integrate with the other features, like flashcard creation and in-browser text-to-speech. * files and images (using the browser's `capture` mechanism to operate cameras) can also be processed similarly. * example sentences were generated and cached using AI

The site is a PWA built with vanilla JS (because I like pain), with Cytoscape and D3 for various rendering tasks.

The backend was built with Firebase, with Genkit + Gemini 2.0 providing the AI integration.

Feel free to check it out: https://hanzigraph.com