Top all-time · #7508
Sinosplice
Personal blog · sinosplice.com/life/archives · on HN as jpasdenculturewriting
Sinosplice is a personal blog at sinosplice.com about culture and writing. Since 2013, 11 different Hacker News readers have linked it 15 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-06-16, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (10) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Sinosplice is a blog on learning Chinese, covering reading comprehension thresholds, tones, and spaced repetition, plus pieces on China's bike-sharing and tech trends. Commenters link it as a reference on these topics.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 10 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /life/archives/2016/08/25/what-80-comprehension-feels-like4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-08-17
What Hacker News says?
This is amazing, and it has truly revolutionary implications for learners of scripts like Chinese, which are still truly indecipherable to learners when embedded in images. I was really happy to see that this extension supports both simplified and traditional Chinese. I tried it out, and while it shows promise there, it definitely still needs a lot of work. I posted a review on my blog here: http://www.sinosplice.co…
Comment linking /life/archives/2014/04/24/can-project-naptha-read-chinese-text-in-images
on “Project Naptha: a browser extension that enables text selection on any image”Submitted A More Complete iOS Solution to the China GPS Offset Problem as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThe thing is, 90% coverage is not that great. What happens is that you understand common words that make up for a lot of structure, but when an uncommon word appears it's probably important to the sentence. For example, "son, if you go to the plumbf tomorrow morning don't forget to pick up some zlonks." 98% is closer to what you need in order to read a text and have an idea of what's going on. See this article: http…
Comment linking /life/archives/2016/08/25/what-80-comprehension-feels-like
on “The most frequent 777 characters give 90% coverage of Kanji in the wild”Submitted Creating Chinese Characters by SVG as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis is wildly misleading advice. Using materials with comprehension below 80% is a massive waste of time. Will you learn something? Yes probably, but will it be time and effort efficient? Not even slightly! At 80-95% it can be productive if you're putting forth a lot of effort, but comprehensible input assumes comprehension above 95% for passive learning of materials. To demonstrate what different (reading in this…
Comment linking /life/archives/2016/08/25/what-80-comprehension-feels-like
on “Language learning with Netflix”Submitted What 80% Comprehension Feels Like as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis post will give you a sense of what understanding 80% of the text looks likes https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2016/08/25/what-80-...
Comment linking /life/archives/2016/08/25/what-80-comprehension-feels-like
on “Learning to Learn”Thank you for the info. I just searched and found this post https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2018/11/15/e-ink-fo...
Comment linking /life/archives/2018/11/15/e-ink-for-the-shanghai-bus-system
on “Ask HN: Has any progress been made on large format E-ink displays?”I was a contributor to Anki and one of the earlier language learning bloggers who wrote about spaced repetition for Chinese learning. One thing I noticed at that time was that those of us Chinese learners who were programmers went crazy about spaced repetition... some went so far as to SRS at the exclusion of actual reading. Other language learners blogging about SRS, often weren't so thrilled about the concept. htt…
Comment linking /life/archives/2009/08/06/the-spaced-repetition-party
on “Memorizing a programing language using spaced repetition software ”IMHO grandparent is saying Linear B is a different, yet related script that appears to be directly derived from a regional variant of Linear A. A script can be used to write arbitrary languages, and does not imply a fully identical mapping to phonemes when used for these different languages. Examples include use of the Arabic script[0] to write Uighur, Urdu, or Farsi. Generally an existing script is adopted for a ne…
Comment linking /life/archives/2013/07/02/the-foreign-feel-of-a-chinese-transliteration
on “Minoan language Linear A linked to Linear B in new research”Similarly, in Mandarin Chinese the tone is generally ignored when singing. However, in Cantonese the tone is "tak[en] ... into consideration" http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2010/12/06/tones-in-...
Comment linking /life/archives/2010/12/06/tones-in-chinese-songs
on “How did ancient Greek music sound?”Here are a couple of good article on the effect these startups have had in China: http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2017/01/24/shanghais... http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2017/02/22/ofo-renta... Expect to see piles and piles of unused bikes littering the streets. Another poster was worried about theft, when the market is saturated by venture-backed bicycles a greater problem for most people will be la…
Comment linking /life/archives/2017/02/22/ofo-rental-bikes-are-getting-owned
on “How 'dockless' cycles flooded China and are heading overseas”This is a nice site, but it's worth mentioning what exactly 90% coverage entails in practice. It's more painful than people might realize. https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2016/08/25/what-80-...
Comment linking /life/archives/2016/08/25/what-80-comprehension-feels-like
on “With 777 Kanji, 90% Coverage of Kanji in the Wild”It's always a balance between efficiency vs willingness to support their learning efforts. This reminded me of an article written by an American living in China recounting his early days there. In it he describes the tricks he developed to practice the local language despite the higher interest of the locals to practice their English with him. https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2010/05/18/language...
Comment linking /life/archives/2010/05/18/language-power-struggles
on “Japan Has Changed a Lot”
