Chinese Reader Revolution - A new Web-Tool for improving reading skills

[陆咔思]

Chinese Reader Revolution (CRR) is a new free web-tool designed to help you learn Chinese by reading. It will annotate any Chinese text in a way that will make it both easier to read, and help you learn as much as possible from it.

To achieve this CRR will

* add Pinyin only to those characters that are probably difficult for you - based on your skill level and character-frequency

* add tone colors

* split the text into words

* show you the definition of the selected word, character and a breakdown of the character into components on mouse-over

* show a difficulty rating for each word

* all of this is done highly accurate and with very high perfomance

By reading this way you will be pushed towards reading characters as much as possible, while getting all the help you need to understand and learn characters and words you don't know yet. You'll have to spend far less time with dull flashcards and instead learn Chinese simply from reading it!

Any feedback is highly appreciated!

[Manuel]

An very interesting idea!

My favourite feature would be the ability to decompose characters into components on mouse-over, however not all characters appear to work. For example, the components of 零 or 妹 are not shown (at least not on my In my system).

I would say for reading I would prefer a tool that shows character info on a mouse pointer tooltip, this way my eyes don't need to look up and down all the time. For this I already use Lingoes.

There is also Adsotrans which has been around for quite a few years now, surely you are aware of it. For most intents and purposes it's quite similar to you tool, although character information is shown on a mouse pointer tooltip.

[陆咔思]

Thanks for your feedback! The decomposition currently works only for about 1000 of the most common characters, more will follow later. I want to make sure the decomposition is correct and actually useful to learners, rather than just any random automatic decomposition, so I'm editing these manually, which takes some time.

About mouse pointer tooltips - there are two reasons I decided against this. First, only a small amount of information can be displayed on a mouse pointer tooltip. Second, it's terribly tempting to just mouse-over everything, and read the translation and pinyin. I made the mistake of reading like this myself for a while, and found I learned very little from it. My tool pushes you toward actually reading characters as much as possible - which may be less comfortable for reading, but I think you'll learn a lot more. And if you do look up a word, it shows you all the information you need to actually learn this word and all it's constituent characters - something I found lacking in Adsotrans and some other comparable tools.

But that's just my opinion, if other users agree they would like mouse pointer tooltips, I will consider optionally showing part of the information as a mouse pointer tooltip instead of on top of the page.

[Manuel]

I must admit initially I was sceptical, but after using you application for about half an hour I am beginning to realize that having the details appear in a slightly inconvenient place has definitely made it less tempting to directly reveal the character info. I find tooltip translation useful when my goal is to understand the text as quickly as possible without worrying about learning (e.g. when quickly skimming through product descriptions on Taobao), but when the goal is to study the text for the sake of it the tooltip can be distracting and counter-productive, so I guess it's horses for courses.

Of course, adding optional tooltip functionality would make your application a very compelling all-rounder.

And here are some areas where Chinese Reader Revolution (CRR) takes the crown away from Adsotrans:

• Speed: I just tried to annotate about one page worth of text in Adsotrans and it couldn't handle it, the hourglass went on forever and I gave up waiting. This happened consistently every time. Your application annotated the whole text almost instantly.
  
• Large font: Adsotrans uses a rather small font in the annotated text. CRR uses nice and big characters.
  
• Efficient use of the screen real estate: Adsotrans only uses 50% of my 1366-pixel-wide screen, the remaining 50% being white background, whereas CRR makes better use of the available width.
  

[陆咔思]

Glad you like it, and thank you so much for pointing out the advantages of CRR. About font, a feature I hadn't mentioned before, font size is automatically adapted to your skill level, so it will be very large for beginners, rather small for very advanced readers.

[Manuel]

What about advanced readers with poor eyesight?

[陆咔思]

I suppose wearing glasses would help most of them ;)

Seriously though, I think it's a very reasonable feature - after all small fonts work just fine for Chinese people. When you use the tool over a long time, as your skill level grows, the texts you read will look more and more like normal Chinese text - with both the amount of Pinyin and the font size being gradually reduced. If some day the text at your skill level is almost the same size as this text and you can hardly find any Pinyin in it you'll know you made it

[Manuel]

Fair enough, although I think font size is the kind of thing that should be customizable. Actual displayed size will vary from one display to another depending on pixel density. In addition, I read somewhere that it's better for our eyes to read large fonts from afar than small fonts from near. I use Firefox though which has a feature to "Zoom Text Only" and then I can Ctrl-Wheel over a web page to enlarge/reduce text as required.

[陆咔思]

I think the automatic font sizes will make sense for most reader, but you're right, of course there will be some cases where a customizable font size is preferable. I'll definitely consider adding an option to manually adjust font size.

[耳耳语语]

Very good, i love the idea to read the pinyin only for the characters above my own level.

I wish it were implemented in Pleco Reader also.

The link in the first line of this thread is missing a "r" , it should read : http://chinesereaderrevolution.com

[陆咔思]

Thanks, fixed the link.

The idea of annotating only difficult characters with pinyin was indeed the main reason I developed this website. I found it to be the best way of actually staying concentrated on reading characters, while at the same time not having to look up unknown characters all the time.

Also, I've updated our databases to now include dempositions of over 2000 characters. The problem that loading the website sometimes took rather long is fixed too.

I'm planning some new features/changes, so I'm wondering, what would people be interested in? My current plans include

* annotating whole websites

* a list of vocabulary in the text (only words above a certain skill level)

* flashcards to study vocabulary before & check what you remembered after reading

* moving the dicitionaries to mouse-tooltip-form

* adding sentence translations from google

Whatever feature people express most interest in will be implemented first.

[icebear]

1&2

[babymumu]

I love this website! But it seems the site had been dead... Is that true? Will you bring it back?

thanks!

[陆咔思]

Thanks! Honestly, as there seemed to be little interest in the site, I've been rather lazy to maintain it. I'm not sure why it's offline now, I'll try to fix it when I have time.

[babymumu]

It has been my favorite pop-up reading tool! I love the design and function of it! Please bring it back if you can. Hope I could help promote your site... Thanks for your talent and work!

[陆咔思]

The site is now finally up and running again. If you could help promote the site of course would be awesome, thanks for your support!

[babymumu]

Thanks! That's great! I'll definitely spread the word because it is such a wonderful tool to use!

[Shelley]

That is a very good tool. I like that it doesn't just translate everything and as you say makes you read it yourself with a bit of help when needed.

 

Thanks for putting in the effort to get it back up.

 

I too will spread the word.