[sasjaws]

I'm building a reader app that tries to solve this exact problem by providing a range of gradually simplified versions of each article to match your proficiency. So you can stay in the sweet spot, or work your way up version by version.

If your target language happens to be Chinese then you can give it a try at https://reader.longyan.io/landing

No login required, love your feedback.

[AlchemistCamp]

Sure. This kind of project seems to be pretty common. I'd strongly suggest using traditional characters as a base because it's very easy to map multiple characters into simplified forms but much harder to disambiguate simplified forms into the traditional versions.

Related comment on another app: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43769831

[sasjaws]

Thanks for having a look, I actually started out from traditional characters, but once I realized >90% of the students only do simplified I switched.

I also tend to believe to just convert between them is not the best approach. Better to find different content for both. If student wants to learn traditional script, they usualy want content from Taiwan and not from China, and the other way round.

[AlchemistCamp]

Almost anybody serious about learning Chinese is going to want to read some things written before the 1960s and for those things, people are reading the exact same books, essays, poems, speeches, etc. The simplified versions of all of those works are literally converted from the traditional versions. Ditto for all kinds of popular content that originated in HK, TW and overseas Chinese communities.

There is no long-term gain from storing "hair" and "emit" under the same entry in your database. Storing 髮 and 發 separately, along with 发 as the simplification of both is a small effort now that will constrain you a lot less in the future. I've literally seen this pitfall happen with about 40 different Chinese learning apps over the last 15 years. Only a few (like Du Chinese and Pleco) got it right early on.