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I was interviewed this week by the very nice people at PythonAnywhere: blog.pythonanywhere.com/79/ . They do a great job of hosting my hanzi analysis scripts, and allow you to create and maintain a site run by the Python language without any configuration, or uploading or downloading anything- you edit the code through a very advanced web editor. You can create a free account to try it out. The code runs on Amazon's EC2 servers, so the performance is quite amazing.

Thes hanzi tools I created do all sorts of things that are too numerous to list, give them a try here: hskhsk.pythonanywhere.com . I made a small improvement to the dictionary today, so that it copes with large amounts of input better. It shows a short phrase word by word, and annotates a longer phrase inline (recognise the poem?)

 
 
OK so maybe the title goes a bit far; it might be more accurate to say "Where people are studying for the HSK" or "Where visitors to my website are from". But there's probably a pretty strong correlation between places where my site is popular, and where people are learning Chinese.

This map combines together country-level and city-level data, and it's pretty clear that most of the learners are from China (18%), Thailand (8%), and Indonesia (7%)! In Western Europe there is a fairly even spread of learners everywhere (except for a gap in central France!), without too much clustering. I wonder if this matches with more formal studies of the popularity of Chinese as a second language?

Splitting the data by 'region', shows that about 60% of the visits to my site are from Asia, 20% are from Europe, and less than 10% are from North America. There are more visits from S.E. Asia than from E. Asia (which includes China)!

A quick summary of how Google split the regions:'

  • Western Asia' is what I would call the 'Middle East',
  • Central Asia is all the 'Stans,
  • Southern Asia is Iran to India,
  • South-East Asia is Burma and Thailand to the Philippines and Indonesia.
  • East Asia is China, Mongolia, Japan, Korea.
  • Northern Europe is the UK and Scandanavia.
  • Western Europe is Germany and France to Switzerland.
 
 
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I'm not sure if there's much point to this one, but just in case someone ever needs it- here's a page that lists all Chinese homophones, with a page for each word length: http://hskhsk.pythonanywhere.com/homophones

I am defining homophones as words with identical pinyin. You can choose whether or not tones should be ignored by selecting the appropriate option.

 
 
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Just added a quick feature to my growing little dictionary/HSK list browsing script that allows you to see the characters for each (or multiple) HSK level(s) grouped by character and all ordered by frequency. Check it out here: http://hskhsk.pythonanywhere.com/radicals?hsk=14

 
 
I have seen this question asked a few times, so here's the best answer I am able to give.
 
 
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My HSK list browsing script took a step closer to being a real dictionary. I added:
  • Pinyin (tones optional) search, no wildcards yet
  • English (definition) search
  • All of the searches are done from the same edit field, very few things will match both English and pinyin, if they do you'll get 
  • Greying out of words/chars that only have frequency information and no dictionary entries
  • Added pinyin and definitions to the tooltip text for all characters/words.
  • Colouring of links to HSK list pages

And it's still lighting fast, and as before shows CC-CEDICT definitions, character composition, and word compounds. Give it a try 现在! http://hskhsk.pythonanywhere.com/cidian?q=%E7%8E%B0%E5%9C%A8

 
 
I have changed my hosting setup; the main site should be unaffected, but you can now browse files at https://github.com/glxxyz/hskhsk.com/tree/main/data
 
 
A few people have asked me this by email, so here's the answer I gave them:
Remember, to really 'know' an HSK word you have to be able to use it in all of the different ways that Hanban expects you to. See my recent posts on HSK 1, HSK 2, and HSK 3 example sentences.
 
 
These HSK 3 example sentences demonstrate the different ways that some HSK 1 words can be used. See my other posts for HSK 1 and HSK 2 example sentences.The first 70 hanzi sentences (to which I added pinyin and English) were taken from the HSK information published by Hanban on www.chinesetest.cn . The rest were created by me to demonstrate the way that specific words (highlighted with 『』square brackets) are used. They are also available as a flashcard text file for HSK levels 1-3. Please share any more examples that you have in the comments. 94 sentences are with hanzi, pinyin, and English are shown after the jump!

 
 
These HSK 2 example sentences demonstrate the different ways that some HSK 2 words can be used. See my other posts for HSK 1 and HSK 3 examples. They are taken from the HSK information published by Hanban on www.chinesetest.cn . They are also available as a flashcard text file for HSK levels 1-3. Please share any more examples that you have in the comments. 53 sentences are with hanzi, pinyin, and English are shown after the jump!