Show HN: I built an app so I could read the 3 Body-Problem in Chinese
readly.inkHey HN!
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
My advice since you’re focused on simplified texts in the PRC is to make sure it doesn’t suck for vertically written traditional characters.
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.
> 1. Buy a book you genuinely want to read (if not genuinely interested, you will lose motivation).
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.
If you ever get a chance to go into a book store in China and see the books printed, I think this might help with motivation. To me, going in these stores and holding a physical Chinese book with all the characters printed is so cool. The first book I read in Chinese was 卖血记 by 许三观。It's a good book by itself, but the main motivation that got me to finish it was the feeling that I was able to understand this classic Chinese literature and read it exactly as the author intended, rather than reading a translation.
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.
> 卖血记 by 许三观
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.
oh lol, I read it early on in my Chinese learning journey so I just googled trying to find what its name was again, thats embarrassing. Thanks for the clarification though.
Looks nice! I like the simplicity of snapping a picture as the ingestion mechanism. If you want to take it to the next level, consider allowing folks to record a video as well.
Thanks, appreciate the feedback! Video would definitely be cool, might build it at some point.
As someone who is on HSK 6, this looks really helpful. Thank you for spending time with the Chinese language. It is really fun to learn.
yes I think it great for HSK 6! If you try it out and have any questions or feedback, feel free to contact me anytime :) my email is alexsimpson96@aol.com
How specific is this for Chinese? Could it also be adapted for any other language with a non-Latin alphabet?
yes it could definitely work for other languages! I started with the niche of Chinese since that's what I'm learning, but if there is demand for other languages I'll build that too.
Reminds me of LingQ. Though, Lingq require importing raw text.
yeah I used LingQ in the past. It's a great tool and was part of my inspiration for this. Realized I needed a tool that worked for physical texts though, so I built Readly.