See the current book form online here. The book is still very incomplete, but input is welcome!
Classical Chinese was the written lingua franca of East Asia until the early 1900's, and as a result several languages from this area still share a large part of their vocabulary (with differences in pronunciation). For example, if you know that the word for "telephone" in Japanese is 電話 (den'wa), you might notice the similar pronunciations in Mandarin (diǎn huà), Korean (jeonhwa) and Vietnamese (điện thoại). This book was created to help you make those connections and leverage your knowledge of one Sino-xenic language to quickly recognize vocabulary in another.
The book is divided into 4 parts, one for each language, and the characters are organized by regularity of pronunciation, following the structure of James W. Heisig's Remembering the Kanji II. The idea behind the character ordering is to allow the learner to cover a lot of ground quickly by first learning groups of characters which have a clear pronunciation given some phonetic component, and proceeding to less regular and more difficult ones later. Each character is presented with its pronunciations, example words using the pronunciation, cross-references with usage in other languages, and some additional information depending on the language.
- Aid in learning sino-xenic languages through knowledge transfer based on other sinoxenic languages
- Collect every last shred of (legally usable) info on the Kanji/Hanja/Hanzi/Hán tự
- Support building a website to satisfy sino-xenic language and linguistics nerds
- Explore the Python ecosystem and have fun :) This repository will serve as my source of a good Python project setup.
- char database
- possible cognate database (words, not just characters!)
The project is managed using Poetry:
pip3 install --user poetry
To install dependencies:
poetry install --no-root
To build the book (output to data/generated/book):
poetry run build-book
To install the pre-commit hooks:
poetry run pre-commit install
If you have to commit or push right now and don't have time to fix a failing test, use one of the following:
git commit --no-verify
git push --no-verify
All of the lints and tests can be run using the poe task verify:
poetry run poe verify
A VSCode settings file is included which contains configurations for all of the linting and formatting tools installed.
Set up the project as described above, and ensure VSCode is using the local virtual environment.
Following discussions here, open the testing tab. It will say that it did not find any tests. Check the output console to get TEST_PORT and TEST_UUID. Then run the following commands in a new terminal:
export TEST_PORT=...
export TEST_UUID=...
PYTHONPATH=~/.vscode/extensions/ms-python.python-2024.0.1/pythonFiles .venv/bin/python -m pytest -p vscode_pytest --collect-only tests
This discovers all of the tests successfully. Then run:
.venv/bin/python ~/.vscode/extensions/ms-python.python-2024.0.1/pythonFiles/vscode_pytest/run_pytest_script.py --rootdir .
This correctly runs the tests. However, if you try to run the tests in the UI they will hang forever.
The extension paths above may be different with different versions of the Python extension for VSCode. Tested as of 2/25/2024.