Show HN: JinbuPal – Learning Chinese doesn't have to be difficult

[mkenny]

My co-founder and I built a Chinese language learning web app that helps you quickly master the most common Chinese characters and recognize 95% of real content. JinbuPal uniquely enhances learning for maximized progress by allowing effortless personalization of your daily study.

When I dreamed up JinbuPal, I was a maker just like others in the HN community. I was working on my electronic hardware startup and I thought that learning the fundamentals of Chinese would help me communicate with manufacturers in Shenzhen. We designed JinbuPal to help you leverage data and your own curiosity to learn as fast as possible. JinbuPal is built for (and by) analytical thinkers with a desire to “hack” Chinese learning and easily identify the “low hanging fruit” to speed up their learning process. We’ve selected the highest impact characters and words, allowing you to make more substantial progress gains with your early study. JinbuPal provides countless ways for you to filter and sort cards, identifying the easiest content for you to learn each day based on your current level and your own curiosity. As you familiarize yourself with characters, you can also utilize these filters to study words which only include characters you are already familiar with.

JinbuPal boosts confidence by giving you real-time feedback of how well you can apply your Chinese skills in the real world. We do this with the JinbuPal Score, which is a metric for what percentage of Chinese you should recognize on average in real content based on our analysis of millions of characters of Chinese text. We then help you to find authentic Chinese content that actually interests you. Finally, you can see your JinbuPal Score come to life by pairing your account with the JinbuPal Chrome extension, analyzing webpages, and visually seeing in your browser how much Chinese you’ve already studied from any given webpage. Once you complete the content in JinbuPal, you should recognize, on average, around 95% of Chinese characters you encounter.

Please take a look at the explainer video embedded on our webpage and register for a free account. I gladly welcome your feedback and anything you’d like to share about your own experience learning Chinese. Thanks! -Mike

[shuafeiwang]

Giving this a shot thank you for sharing! A bit of a tangent here...It might just be me, but I always struggle with confusing similar characters together (I don't handwrite so happens often especially when I see them out of context). I find when using ANKI that I think I know a character but I only know it relative to the set of characters I'm learning. That character is considered learned, but when a new character that's similar gets added, I have to essentially relearn both. I built a very simple tool integrating Anki with ios shortcuts to get me to quickly add commonly confused characters and then test me on those characters specifically. I found that helped me a lot but isn't an ideal solution. If this is a common issue with others, it might be something to consider adding!

Some initial thoughts + feedback on the app: Overwhelming! It might be worth creating a very very simple guided process to get people clicking and playing right away, and then the ability to dig deeper and customize your cards can be done later. Adding from a list of too many options feels a bit dizzying. There could be an auto-mode that lets me get a feel of the app first then later can go 'oh I can customize'

[mkenny]

Thanks for the feedback!

I actually have considered adding a feature for easily-confused characters in a more obvious way. As for now, you can filter by a particular radical, but that requires you applying it outside of a card. I would like to eventually show easily confused cards or a way to directly apply a radical filter from directly inside of cards, based on the radical components of that character. I will have to get that one back on the list. Even if it is not comprehensive to start, there would definitely be a benefit to cover some of the most commonly confused characters (己/已，土/士, etc).

It has definitely been a challenge to get the balance right of getting people up and running, while also fully understanding the capabilities JinbuPal has right from start. We will have to consider how best to accomplish that and I appreciate your suggestions. It sounds like we still have some tweaking to do to get the balance right there!

[iisan7]

Thanks for sharing. Intermediate level speaker interested in having a review method since I no longer use Chinese in daily life but don't want to lose it all either. I have never quantified the N characters I know since I never learned from an app. Tedious to have to mark the many characters I know 3 times for meaning, pinyin, tone, wish there was a way to do that more quickly. Also in it seems like you're thinking about this app in terms of quickly gaining a high % recognition, but I would love for it to recommend characters to learn based on characters I know already and the frequency with which they occur together, rather than unrelated characters in order to boost my % score.

[mkenny]

Thanks for your feedback!

I will definitely consider a way we could batch the marking of characters and words as known once you are through the onboarding. I am not sure if you've already set up an account or not, but I should mention that you are able to do this in the onboarding flow when you import characters.

I like your suggestion of the auto-recommendation of characters to learn based on your current knowledge and the frequency of words you could potentially access by knowing the next character. I will definitely consider how to incorporate this functionality. If you import characters through the onboarding, JinbuPal will automatically apply filters to recommend your first 20 characters to learn based on which unknown character have the least number of meanings and are most frequently used. However, this is just for when you complete the onboarding and I see a big benefit to making continual recommendations as you suggested.

[pringk02]

Is this intended to be a "from-zero" Chinese learning tool in itself? Or just for literacy for people who can speak and make sense of Chinese grammar already?

How does it deal with teaching the common grammatical particles like 的, 地 and 得? Or 把 constructions?

At first glance it looks like flash cards for vocab, but I'm not sure if I am misunderstanding it. If this is the case, you are competing with some of the phenomenal free decks that can be downloaded for Anki

[mkenny]

Thanks for your questions!

JinbuPal is a tool for anyone from complete beginners all the way up to higher level speakers. Regarding grammar, characters which have grammatical usages have links in their respective cards which send users to articles on external grammar resources. As a learner, you can choose to study whatever you want, whenever you want based on your curiosity or how much time you have on a given day of study. You can apply grammar filters in the app to hone your focus on studying only grammatically used characters or filter them away for days when you don’t have the time or patience to learn about grammar.

What makes JinbuPal unique is the ability to see your percentage recognition grow in real time as you complete characters and words in the app. Not only that, but you can then use the JinbuPal Chrome Extension to boost your confidence by visually seeing what you already know from authentic content. Additionally, the side-by-side card layout gets you in the habit of scanning left to right as you test your knowledge, making for a more natural transition from memorization to natural reading than you would get from using traditional flashcards.

Also, traditional flashcard apps (Anki included) by default emphasize a Pass/Fail method with regard to assessing how well you remember all aspects of a character simultaneously (Pinyin, Tone, & Meaning). We believe that allowing for independently tracking these aspects helps you feel more confident as a beginner since you can track more characters as “learned”, even if you aren’t yet very confident with the tone. We believe it’s important to understand that fully grasping tones and remembering them correctly often takes far more repetition than learning new pinyin pronunciations and meanings. We’d much rather encourage beginners to start by learning 2x-3x times the number of characters with inaccurate tones than only 1x but with perfect tones. The reason being, the more you can recognize in a short time, the more confidence you feel about being able to approach real content you enjoy and the more likely your confidence will foster long term study. As learners progress, they can easily go back and shore up areas of weakness because what they know and don’t know is tracked accordingly.

[pringk02]

Thanks for the detailed reply

[webmaven]

The registration form requires me to agree to abide by the T&C etc., but doesn't link to them for me to evaluate.

Also, "start for free" is great, but at what point will I be asked to pay, and how much?

[mkenny]

Sorry about that! We will definitely incorporate a direct link to the Terms & Conditions from the registration page. Thanks for that feedback! You can access the terms directly here: https://app.jinbupal.com/terms.

The app gives you 50 free characters, after which you will be unable to track new characters unless you are a subscriber. When you try to track characters after you've used all 50, you will be shown a popup with a link to subscribe. You can see how many free characters you have remaining in the left menu pane. The left menu pane also shows a coupon code for your first month free (code: JIAYOU23). Subscription pricing is available here: https://jinbupal.com/pricing/

[nubinetwork]

How about a Japanese version?

[mkenny]

We actually have a beta going on right now for Cantonese, so Japanese would be the next language after that. With the Cantonese version, we incorporate additional filters that allow you to leverage what you might already know from Mandarin to learn Cantonese faster. We would plan to do the same thing with Japanese as well.