Outlier Linguistic Solutions

[OneEye]

I have a few updates:

 

We've added a Recent News section.

Ash gave a well-received presentation at ICLP last week. We took video and will be putting together some clips to post to YouTube.

I officially joined as an investor and board member last week.

And the big news: our website is now available in Chinese (both traditional and simplified). Except the Recent News section, which is being translated.

[OneEye]

ICLP has asked Ash to teach a course on how to learn Chinese characters this fall. For those who aren't familiar with ICLP, it's one of the top Chinese language schools in the world, so this is great news for us!

[Demonic_Duck]

The dictionary will cover the 3000 most common characters (in both simplified and traditional), with an additional volume planned later with another 3000 for those who require more. Both an English and a German edition will be published initially, with hopefully other languages to follow, and every edition will be entirely bilingual (both Chinese and the base language).

Does this mean that editions will be available where the Chinese explanatory text will be in simplified? I.e. English/Trad, English/Simp, German/Trad, German/Simp will all be available?

[OneEye]

Yes, we'll be doing both simplified and traditional versions of the explanations. Additionally, the dictionary will contain both simplified and traditional variants of the 3000 characters, so you can look up either one and read the explanation in either one too.

[xiaokaka]

Sounds good!

Any news on the release format? Have you spoken with Michael Love about a possible Pleco version? That would be the best and most user friendly solution imo.

[OneEye]

We're a little behind where we wanted to be as far as that goes. We're working on a mock-up with some sample entries which we'll send to [insert company here] in hopes of getting a contract, and we're being a bit perfectionistic about it so it's taking a while. I don't know if I should say the name of the company until it's finalized. But rest assured, Chinese-forums will hear about the release format as soon as I do.

[Demonic_Duck]

Well, with the news that you'll do simplified versions, that just makes me all the more excited about this! I'd hazard a guess that by the time this is released I'll already know 3k odd characters, but the etymology stuff's fascinating, and it'll be good for comparing simplified forms to traditional forms, too.

 

Any estimates on pricing?

[OneEye]

Don't quote me on this, but probably around US$20-30. We're a long way from talking about that, though.

[hedwards]

Have you given any consideration into indexing? One of the big problems I had with trying to look characters up before I gave up and just got tools aimed at foreigners was having to figure out both the specific radical used for indexing and the number of strokes in the character.

 

It's not easy, but indexing it by something that's as rule based as possible would help a lot. I'm not sure you need to go as far as  McGraw-Hill's Chinese Dictionary and Guide to 20,000 Essential Words: A New Method for Non-Native Speakers to Look Up the 2,000 Most Commonly Used Characters in Chinese does. They categorize the characters based upon the top left most stroke followed by the number of strokes in the character. With any stroke that makes a 90 degree or greater bend considered to be broken at each of those bends for the purpose of counting.

 

I should point out that they do also have a more traditional radical based index as well.

 

I think that's probably going a bit overboard with making it accessible to people that aren't strong with their component sense, but I do think that having a more accessible indexing system would greatly increase the number of potential buyers.

[OneEye]

That's definitely something we're considering, especially when it comes to the paper edition. We've given a lot of thought to ease of use, and we plan on including as many useful ways of indexing as possible.

 

In other news, as I announced in our most recent newsletter, we're considering doing an online video course about how to learn Chinese characters. We'll be explaining the Outlier system in detail, including how to apply this stuff now, before the dictionary is out. Maybe at Udemy or some place like that. Would anyone here be interested?

[hedwards]

That's going to depend a bit on price and where it's posted. I'm a fan of Udemy, they've got some really good courses there already. Without knowing your system, I don't know if it would make sense to do a short promotional course for free and then a more in depth one that you charge for. I'm guessing that it wouldn't make much sense.

 

I'm not surprised that you've already been considering indexing, indexes are probably the biggest problem for beginners and often times a bit of an issue for more experienced readers.

 

But, if it's as well thought out as I think it's going to be, I'd be likely to subscribe when it first comes out. Just please try to avoid too many hard sell techniques. It tends to irritate me and I refuse to buy such courses by habit. Good material shouldn't need too much pressure to sell.

[imron]

I will never purchase any product that has 'exploding' one-off discounts if you just buy now.

[OneEye]

Well, we're not planning to do that sort of thing, or use any hard-sell tactics or anything like that. We're just kicking the idea around right now, but our philosophy is that whatever we do, it has to be quality. Quality speaks for itself, and if we have to resort to gimmicky marketing to sell something, it isn't worth selling. If we do a course, it will be reasonably priced and it will be worthwhile. The point is to put something out there that will be useful for people in the interim between now and when we release the dictionary.

[Yadang]

I'd definitely be interested!

[OneEye]

OK, I have a few updates.

 

Our blog and social media accounts have been fairly quiet recently, but with good reason. I was in Taiwan last week to shoot our Kickstarter video, which is now being edited. We had a really outstanding production team and I think it will turn out really well. The final version won't be ready until February some time, because...

 

We're spending most of January in the US. We'll be pitching the dictionary to another company in hopes of licensing it to them. I won't say who until it's over and we (hopefully) have an official agreement of some sort. We're also visiting several major universities. We'll be presenting our research in person to some very heavyweight Sinologists, and in a few cases we'll make presentations to students, too. I'll announce the dates and times for those once they're finalized. We're hoping some of the professors will be excited enough about what we're doing (several have already expressed their excitement to us) to film a short endorsement that we can add to our Kickstarter video.

 

We're also working on a demo of the dictionary containing sample entries for 20-30 characters, along with various other really cool functions. It will be ready by the time we go to the US, but we won't release it until we've licensed it, for legal reasons (it's designed to look and function the way it will in the app we're hoping to license to).

 

Assuming all the above goes well (and I don't have any reason to think it won't), we're planning to launch the Kickstarter in March. February would clash with Chinese New Year and January won't work because we won't have everything ready by then.

 

So, Kickstarter in March.

 

As a complement to the video course I mentioned above (which will take a while), we're also planning on publishing a poster and some textbooks and workbooks. They'll cover the most common meaning and sound components (100 each). The poster should be ready first, obviously, with everything else hopefully following shortly thereafter. We're hoping to have the poster ready in February, and we're planning to include the poster, textbooks, workbooks, and video course as perks at different levels of donation, to be delivered as we finish them. The textbooks will teach not just what the most common sound and meaning components are, but also how exactly how they express sound and meaning within characters, and the workbooks will contain exercises designed to teach how characters work on a systemic level. This project will really form the core of the dictionary's content too, so I think they'll complement each other nicely while not distracting us too much from our main focus of finishing the dictionary.

 

I know there are a lot of posters out there already, but ours will differ from what's out there in several important ways, not least of which is that it contains functional components rather than radicals, will feature beautifully handwritten characters rather than computer fonts, and will also contain a simple diagram outlining each character's graphic evolution, similar to the images you see here, as well as several characters containing that component. We should have a preview ready within a few weeks (hopefully about the same time the dictionary demo is ready).

 

So that's what we've been up to lately. Lots of exciting stuff in the pipeline!

[hedwards]

I hope the publisher is able to do an ebook version rather than just a paper copy. I'll be back in China and I'd rather not have to deal with the inconvenience of a dead tree edition.

 

And I do agree with you about the functional components, it's just a shame that so many of the components don't have a name, which makes it a bit trickier to memorize them.

[OneEye]

The first release will be in an electronic format. We do plan on releasing a paper version, but that will come much later. The demand for a hard copy is not nearly as high, so it isn't one of our main priorities right now.

[freipole]

Will the electronic format be accessible on multiple platforms? Sometimes the software is released only for Windows, but people use Mac and Linux and Android and other systems too.

[OneEye]

Don't worry, it will be cross-platform. I probably shouldn't say much more than that until everything has been made official, but rest assured we'll make it as accessible as we can.

[Demonic_Duck]

Out of interest, why does the bottom of your introduction page on the Outlier website say

"Crystal Pancake"

in invisible white text?