Introducing our Developer API
Earlier this year, we launched our first app-to-app integration with Du Chinese, and the uptake has been phenomenal: almost a quarter of our users have synchronized their Du Chinese and Hack Chinese accounts!
These students are extra efficient: they read in Du Chinese, and then Du Chinese automatically sends their saved words to Hack Chinese for further review.
(Didn't know this was a thing? Synchronize your account now!)
Less friction = more efficient learning
Today we are announcing our new Developer API which will enable more apps to integrate their services with Hack Chinese.
At launch, our API is quite basic, but we look forward to increasing its power and flexibility over time.
At present, there are three Chinese learning apps (some you've probably heard of) that are already tinkering with our new API. With any luck, some (or all) of these new integrations will be ready before the end of the year!
Developers, check out our Developer API!
Exporting Lists
You can now export your personal lists as CSV files so you can do your own data analysis, share with others, or import into other software programs. Head to any Personal List and press 'Export as CSV'.
If you'd like to export a list of *all* the words you've ever learned in Hack Chinese, you can go to Settings > Export and select 'Export all learned words'.
Podcast Discussion
On the latest episode of the, “I’m Learning Mandarin” podcast, Mischa Wilmers invited our founder Daniel Nalesnik and Professor Karen Chung (a linguist with decades of experience working at the National Taiwan University) to explore the following question:
Does Stephen Krashen’s Input Hypothesis & Comprehensible Input Work for Learning Mandarin Chinese?
From Mischa Wilmers’ of the “I’m Learning Mandarin” Podcast / Blog:
“Professor Stephen Krashen has arguably had more of an impact in the field of modern language education than any other academic linguist.
His Input Hypothesis - a group of five hypotheses developed in the 1970s and 80s, argues that comprehensible input is the key component required for successful second language acquisition.
Language education in schools and universities has traditionally been based on the belief that practice speaking, vocabulary memorisation, repetition drills and grammar rules are the keys to learning a second language.
According to Krashen, however, studying information about languages in the form of grammar rules and practicing speaking through repetition drills are of marginal importance. Instead we acquire languages when we understand messages through reading and listening to our target language.”
Now, grab your headphones and a large iced coffee and have a listen!
Hotfixes
A few updates:
We have a bunch of developments in store for the coming weeks, stay tuned!
Hotfixes
Thanks to your emails, we've made a few more updates in the past few days:
Hotfixes
Thanks to your emails, we've made a few more updates in the past few days:
New Setting: New Word Limiting
You can now set an upper limit for how many new words to learn each day. The default is 10 new words per day, but you can change this in Settings.
New Setting: Color Characters & Pinyin by Tone
Pleco and other apps have popularized the coloring of elements according to their tone. Given the widespread adoption, we have elected to use the same coloring scheme. (If you can think of a great reason why other color schemes should be available, let us know!) Update: We are having trouble with using the correct colors for light mode / dark mode. Stay tuned.
New Setting: Toneless Pinyin
If you turn on coloring of Pinyin or characters, you now have the option of displaying Pinyin without any tone marks.
Updated Settings Screen
We've redesigned our Settings screen in order to make each user-configurable option more discoverable and easier to understand. We are also playing with the idea of giving it a more prominent spot in the interface: right on the top navigation bar (previously it was in the dropdown menu). We found some students never discovered the previous settings page, which is a shame, as some very important decisions can be made there. Let us know what you think!
More hotfixes
Thanks to your emails, we've made a few more updates in the past few days:
We have several updates that relate to the character set (simplified vs. traditional) that you can choose in Settings:
We also fixed two bugs:
More hotfixes
Thanks to your emails, we've made a few more updates in the past few days:
Hotfixes
Thanks to your emails, we've identified several areas that needed some extra polish after yesterday's big release. Here's what we've fixed so far:
More Speed, New Features
TLDR: We have rewritten our study session code from the ground up. Audio dropping and interface lag on mobile devices should be eliminated. We've also added many exciting new features.
Ahh, finally. We've launched what we've been working on for the last few months!
Typically, we launch new features every couple weeks, so waiting over 5 months for this update has been challenging. We thrive on feedback from the community and without updates to share, we received little feedback. It was tough! Here's the story:
Last year, we realized we had three major issues.
First, the interface could become laggy when studying on mobile devices. It got to the point where some students reported issues in every study session, sometimes resorting to studying exclusively on desktop machines. Bummer.
Second, after interface lag would appear, audio could become very fragile: sometimes it would no longer play in a study session, or it would play sporadically. Not ideal.
Finally, the code that powered our study sessions was becoming unmanageable. When we launched Hack Chinese four years ago, we used a Javascript library called jQuery because it was simple to learn and easy to code in, which helped us move quickly when we started.
Today, Hack Chinese is much more advanced, and jQuery is no longer the right tool for the job. It was hard to create the experience we wanted to: We needed something that would help us write cleaner, more manageable code, while delivering the speed you expect from a modern web application.
So, in the last few months, we've re-written our entire study-session codebase in React, an ultra-modern Javascript library created by Facebook. It not only delivers better performance, but it also makes adding features in the future a lot easier. Win win!
In the process of recreating our study session code, we encountered countless situations where we had a choice: recreate a feature that we knew needed to change eventually, or just change it now. Every time, we opted for the latter. Which gives us a whole bunch of exciting new features to announce today alongside the rollout of our new study sessions.
More than ever, we're super excited about the future of Hack Chinese. We have a clear understanding (from communicating with you!) what features we need next, and you'll start seeing some of these roll out in the coming weeks. If we can help it, we'll try to stay away from the big multi-month rewrites so we can return to delivering a steady stream of micro updates to keep everything fresh and new.
Reminder! With all updates (and especially gigantic ones like this!), there will be bugs. Let us know about them, and we'll fix them. Thanks so much for your patience!
Now... onto the new features!
We've also fixed several bugs:
I also want to extend a special thanks to everyone who offered to help beta test. We sent an email to our users asking for 10 volunteers, and within 24 hours we had over a hundred volunteers. In the end we asked ~35 to participate, and received invaluable feedback that helped us squash a few dozen bugs. Thank you, thank you!
Link your Du Chinese and Hack Chinese accounts
Last year, we partnered with Du Chinese to bring you vocabulary lists from their entire library of 2,000+ articles (available in our List Catalog: Du Chinese Lists).
This year, we’ve integrated our services to make learning with both tools even more convenient.
Connecting your accounts takes about a minute, and enables some powerful abilities:
Special thanks to the incredible team at Du Chinese who worked closely with us in order to make this integration possible.
To learn more about this new integration and get started, check out the Du Chinese Sync page.
The 'Slow Chinese' Membership
Andrew Methven's free 'Slow Chinese' newsletter is probably the Internet's best source of modern Chinese language (slang words and phrases trending on social and traditional media).
Earlier this year, Slow Chinese launched a paid membership option with several enticing extras that we think are pretty awesome.
Learn more about Slow Chinese and their new membership option on our Collaborations page.
Hack Chinese on the 'You Can Learn Chinese' podcast
Our founder, Daniel Nalesnik, sat down with Jared Turner (of the “Mandarin Companion” graded reader series) to discuss:
Search your favorite podcast app for "You Can Learn Chinese" episode #81 or listen now.
Hotfixes
New List Type: Frequency Lists
Frequency Lists are vocabulary lists that sort words according to how often they appear in a given “corpus” of text.
For example, to create a frequency list based on Chinese TV dramas, one would first analyze the subtitles of hundreds of TV episodes (like this guy did) and then count how many times each word was used.
The more times a word was used, the earlier it appears in the list. If you then study from that list, you're learning the most frequently-used words first, and being ultra efficient in the process.
We’ve added two popular frequency lists to start, and are looking forward to your suggestions for which lists to add next.