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Reading Chinese At Different Levels Of Comprehension

I copied this post over from the old Primlo blog on 16 July 2019. I still think it's pretty cool even though it didn't get a lot of attention back then.

John Pasden over at sinosplice wrote a very cool blog post on simulating the experience of reading a Chinese text as a second language learner for people who can read Chinese fluently. The idea is to a certain percentage of characters in a text with very obscure characters so rare that even native speakers don't know them. I thought it would be cool to be able to play around with different texts and difficulties so I hacked together a little bit of JavaScript which you can try out below. If you have font problems, try installing Google Noto.


100% comprehension

汉字,又称中文字、华文字、唐话字,是汉字文化圈广泛使用的一种文字,为世界上独有的一种指示会意文字体系,也是世界上唯一仍被广泛使用并高度发展的语素文字,由中国上古时代的汉族先民所发明创制,其字体也历经过长久改进及演变。
当前确切历史,可追溯至约公元前1300年商朝的甲骨文、籀文、金文,再到春秋战国与秦朝的籀文、小篆,发展至汉朝隶变,产生隶书、草书以及楷书(以及派生的行书),至唐代楷化为今日所用的手写字体标准——正楷,也是今日普遍使用的现代汉字。