Show HN: I built an app so I could read the 3 Body-Problem in Chinese
I’m Alex, and one of my favorite ways to learn languages is by reading novels. Currently I’m reading 三体 (3 body problem), but one problem I've always had is it takes ages to look up words, and add them to Anki flashcards so I can remember them. 三体 is especially brutal with so much sci-fi vocab.
That’s why I built Readly. I snap a pic of the page I’m reading, it loads the text in-app and lets me lookup words, add to Anki-style flashcards, or ask AI questions about the text, all in a single tap. It's a huge time saver.
My specific learning strategy, if anyone wants to replicate it:
1. Buy a book you genuinely want to read (if not genuinely interested, you will lose motivation). 2. Load the pages into Readly. Translate any words you don’t know and add them to flashcards. 3. Once you finish a chapter, re-read it quickly without any tools. Then move to the next chapter. 4. If you want to improve listening skills, Readly lets you listen to the text too. Personally I repeat every page several times until I fully understand it.
As a brit who only started learning Chinese in my 20s, I was able to take grad school classes fully taught in Chinese after only a few years, so reading novels is definitely a useful strategy! (Tsinghua uni, data science).
Readly also works great for reading assignments in textbooks, social media posts on 小红书 (red note), Chinese AI research papers, or any Chinese text tbh.
I know Chinese reading is a bit niche, but hopefully some other people here can enjoy it! Please let me know any feedback :)
Alex
Having watched Chinese-learning apps for a long time, a common failure mode is treating traditional characters as an afterthought, when it’s actually a lot cleaner to use them as a base. simplified variants were made so that readers of traditional characters could easily make the switch, but the reverse is not true. If your db treats “face” and “noodle” or “wind” and “typhoon” as the same character from the beginning, it’s a lot harder to separate later.
This has been my issue. There's a really small set of novels I enjoy. The better (but not good) recommendations have been to re-read something I've already read as a translation. I have never re-read a novel in my life and I'm not sure it being a frustrating experience would make it more appealing.
There's probably a market for something that helps connect people to books/stories/media they would actually like in other languages, ideally that isn't already commonly available translated.
After a few books, just the excitement of being able to read novels in Chinese is probably not enough though. At that point, it needs to be a book you genuinely like. I'm lucky that the 三体 books are interesting to me, they will keep me busy for a while.
Connecting people to media they like in other languages is a good idea though. Maybe I'll try sharing more about the best novels to read in Chinese as some point.
The book is called 《许三观卖血记》, and its author is 余华.
许三观 is not the author's name.