I’m progressing through HSK1 words, ~170 right now.
The more words I’m learning, the more I see that hanzihero is poorly defining similar words, especially when the context already exist.
This results in me having to use something like ChatGPT/Gemini to help me further distinguish the difference between each word. It’s a slight inconvenience but seems to be growing consistent the more words I learn. The back and forth to verify that it is not that similar or the context varies becomes annoying when I feel it is something that can be easily addressed when a word is added to hanzihero
I forgot that ones i saw last week but I’ll show some examples. Also sorry, using my phone so you’re getting pinyin
Speaking from experience, the more and more and more words you learn in Chinese, you’ll find that 5-10 Chinese words can map to a single word in English. So, the example sentences under these words are probably going to help you out a lot.
HanziHero is great for learning to read/recognize these words, but in terms of context-specific meaning, that’ll be more in your hands for practicing using it in the correct settings.
For example, you may see 汉文 from time to time, so it’s good to know that it means “Chinese language”, and implicitly, it refers to the language generally spoken by the Han people (largest ethnicity in China), but you’ll almost always see Chinese referred to as 中文. Similarly, 朋友 is almost always used to refer to friend, whereas 友人 is rarer and used it more formal or artistic contexts, but ultimately, they do both mean “friend”. Think of “friend” versus “companion” versus “partner” versus “pal”. Even in English these could all mean friend, but you learn the difference of context through practice and application.
Some of the earlier words we added (~1-2 years ago) do need to have their examples improved to better illustrate the meaning we are teaching. We have a backlog of those that we hope to fix up once we finish adding at least 1 word for each HSK character in the curriculum (currently about ~300 left to go).
However, even with better context provided by the example sentences, this will always be a problem due to the nature of Chinese. If we take the example of the English word of “Chinese (language)” to demonstrate:
漢文 - Chinese (Han) language (emphasis on written form)
漢語 - Chinese language (emphasis on spoken form)
中文 - Chinese language(s) (emphasis on written form)
國語 - national language, used to refer to Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan
普通話 - language of communication, used to refer to Chinese in China
華語 - Chinese language (emphasis on spoken form)
華文 - Chinese language (emphasis on written form)
It’s sort of impossible for us to make meaningful English terms/meanings that can differentiate the subtle differences between the terms. For example, of the bunch, 華語 is probably the most neutral, while 普通話 is not really well-received in Taiwan. 國語 is more common in Taiwan, but also controversial even within Taiwan because of the history of forced language education after the arrival of the ROC government. 中文 is probably the most widespread term, but not terribly precise. Interestingly enough, Mandarin Chinese 官話 is rare enough that I’ve never heard it spoken, even though in English we often use this term to be as precise as possible.
This is also seen at the character level where 見 視 看 睹 瞧 etc all roughly mean “to look at” or “to see”. When we add and improve these, I try my best to really pick the best English word that captures its particular feel within Chinese while also adding as many realistic “alternate meanings” as possible to minimize frustration when people type in “look” instead of “see” etc, but there will always be gaps that is intrinsic to translation.
Since the goal of HanziHero is to help people achieve basic character literacy, I try not to let this deter me as I work on the curriculum, as the subtleties between words, character, phrases, etc all later become most clear once one is regularly working with the language. That is, HanziHero tries its best to be accurate, but we are not a dictionary, and using rare English terms to be more precise has the trade off of confusing users whose English is a second or third language.
Your points are definitely valid, though. Perhaps we can make better use of the “note” area to give additional context that the example sentences alone cannot provide.
I fully understand at a high level, it’s not going to be a 1:1 match. Chinese has a much longer and richer history than something like English resulting in poor translations at times.
I’m more asking for the possibility of something like @kevin mentioned, where we are at least aware of the general context because at least for me, this being completely new in every facet, I don’t fully understand the minor differences in the language.
A random example is me learning 汉语 (hanyu) first, trying to use it and being corrected that if anything 中文 (zhongwen) would be more approriate. Without further looking into it, I had the assumption they were interchangeable but they weren’t.
Needless to say, I do appreciate all the HanziHero team does, this is just a minor inconvenince when it comes to learning