Show HN: Mandarin Word Segmenter with Translation (opens in new tab)

That's not been my experience at all: As long as the content I'm reading is at the right level, I've been able to learn to segment as my vocabulary has grown, and there's always only a few new words that I haven't learned how to recognize in-context yet. Having a good built-in dictionary wherever you're reading (e.g., a Chrome plugin, or Pleco, or whatever) has been helpful here.

My fear would be that the longer you put off learning to segment in your head, the harder it will be.

My advice for this would be that you present the text as you'd normally see it (e.g., no segmentation), but add aids to help learners see or understand the segmentation. At very least you could have the dictionary pop-up be on the level of the full segmentation, rather than individual characters; and you could consider having it so that as you mouse over a character, it draws a little line under / border around the characters in the same segment. That could allow you to give your brain the little hint it needs to "see" the words segmented "in situ".

I’ve done a fair amount of Chinese language segmentation programming - and yeah it’s not easy, especially as you reach for higher levels of accuracy.

You need to put in significant amounts of effort just for less than a few % point increases in accuracy.

For my own tools which focus on speed (and used for finding frequently used words in large bodies of text) I ended up opting for a first longest match algorithm.

It has a relatively high error rate, but it’s acceptable if you’re only looking for the first few hundred frequently used words.

What segmented are you using, or have you developed your own?

I tried to built something similar, but what I didn't discover and think is crucial is the proper FE: yes, word segmenting is useful, but if I have to click on each word to see its meaning, for how I learn Chinese by reading texts, I still find Zhongwen Chrome extension to be more useful, since I see English meaning quicker, just by hover cursor over the word.

In my project, I was trying to display English translation under each Chinese word, which would I think require AI to determine the correct translation, since one cannot just put CC-CEDIT entry there.

P.S: I dont know how you built your dictionary, it translated 气功师 as "Aerosolist", which I am not sure what is exactly, but this should be actually two words, not one - correct segmentation and translation is 气功 师, "qigong master".

Also the 'clip reader' feature in Pleco is decent.

Also, supporting simplified as well as traditional might increase your potential audience.

https://all-day-breakfast.com/chinese/

What is kind of interesting is that the script itself (a single Perl CGI script) has survived the passage of time better than the text documenting it.

Besides all the broken links, the text refers throughout to Big-5 encoding, and the form at https://all-day-breakfast.com/chinese/big5-simple.html has a warning that the popups only work in Netscape or MSIE 4. You can now ignore all of that because browsers are more encoding aware (it still uses Big-5 internally but you can paste in Unicode) and the popups work anywhere.

That's not true at all; you can go a long way just by clicking on characters in Pleco, and Pleco's segmentation algorithm is awful. (Specifically, it's greedy "find the longest substring starting at the selected character for which a dictionary entry exists".)

Sometimes I go back through very old conversations in Chinese and notice that I completely misunderstood something. That's an unfortunate but normal part of the language-learning process. You don't need full comprehension to learn. What would babies do?

That app has been invaluable as someone learning Chinese.

that app breaks down mandarin sentences into individual characters. I believe it’s made by a Taiwanese developer too.

I tried your app with a few sentences and it works really well!