Notes on learning Chinese, and on building software that people actually use. Written by the team behind KoiSpeak.
You are reading a menu, a sign, or a page of a novel, and one character stops you. You cannot type it because you do not know how it is read. Here are five ways in, ranked by how fast they get you an answer.
Vocabulary counts only tell you part of the story. Here is what each HSK level actually demands, where learners typically stall, and how to tell which level you are really at.
Most learners can produce four tones in isolation and still cannot be understood in a sentence. The gap is not effort. It is that tones behave differently in connected speech, and almost nobody is taught that part.
There are 214 Kangxi radicals. You do not need all of them to start guessing what characters mean. Here are around thirty that carry most of the weight, with the characters they unlock.
Flashcards work, and most people still quit within two months. Almost always for the same four reasons. Here is how to design a deck you will still be using next year.
Waiting until you know enough words is a trap, because the words come from reading. Here is how to start earlier than feels sensible without drowning.
A dictionary that accepts three input scripts can either ask the user to choose, or work it out. Choosing is easier to build and worse to use. Here is how we made the guess reliable.
Switching language with JavaScript on a single URL is the most common way to make six translations invisible to search engines. Here is what actually gets indexed, and how to structure a static site so it does not happen.
Performance treated as an optimisation phase always loses to features. Treated as a constraint agreed before design starts, it quietly shapes better decisions for free.
Most apps bolt offline support on at the end and discover it was an architecture question all along. Here is what actually has to change, and the conflict rules you have to choose between.
Most first versions are late because of what went into them, not how fast the team worked. Here is the cutting method we use, and the three things that are never worth cutting.
Plenty of companies discover after the final invoice that they cannot deploy their own product. Here is everything that should be in your name, and how to check before the relationship ends.
