[cannam]

This was my attempt at doing something a little bit like it, 27 years ago. It's mostly interesting as a historical artifact - certainly yours is a lot more sophisticated and much much prettier! This one just does greedy matching against CEDICT.

https://all-day-breakfast.com/chinese/

What is kind of interesting is that the script itself (a single Perl CGI script) has survived the passage of time better than the text documenting it.

Besides all the broken links, the text refers throughout to Big-5 encoding, and the form at https://all-day-breakfast.com/chinese/big5-simple.html has a warning that the popups only work in Netscape or MSIE 4. You can now ignore all of that because browsers are more encoding aware (it still uses Big-5 internally but you can paste in Unicode) and the popups work anywhere.

[ipnon]

Awesome! Your Chinese must be pretty good now. Do you still have the Perl source? How did you even devise such a project in 1998?

[cannam]

There's a link to the Perl code hidden in the third para of text ("The [Perl source] for this script is available...") Of course a big reason it still works is that it was written for Perl 5, which is still current!

What that link doesn't give you is the dictionary files I used as input for the preprocessing step - which of course were also 1998 vintage. There are copies on the server (https://all-day-breakfast.com/chinese/cedict.b5_saved, https://all-day-breakfast.com/chinese/big5-PY.tit)

My Chinese got somewhat better, then a lot worse, then a little bit better again - obviously mostly to do with whether I was actually using it, which on the whole I haven't been. But back then I was really working on it and I just wanted something to help - there were a few useful resources I knew of (CEDICT obviously, and Rick Harbaugh's zhongwen.com was mindblowing at the time) and this seemed like a way to glue them together that I actually knew how to do.

Writing learning tools is obviously not the same thing as learning though.