checked out the tool and think it's a cool idea! one piece of feedback though - I actually feel like the inverse product would be more helpful for me. What I mean is replacing ~95% of english text with words (Chinese in my case) that I can understand, and leaving the remaining ~5% (words I definitely don't know) in English.
At least for me, there's large value in consuming bigger volumes of Chinese to get me used to pattern-matching on the characters, as opposed to only reading a smaller amount of harder characters that I'm less likely to actually encounter
That makes a lot of sense, it really highlights the diffences in learning stages.
My current tool if primarily designed for intermediate language learners who have already learned some basic words, but still in the 'accumulation phase' - their main bottleneck is vocabulary size, so they need to see new words frequently.
it sounds like you are at a more advanced stage of learning Chinese, you have moved past simple vocab building and are focusing on flow and fluency reading. For your use case, that 'inverse' approach (Chinese with English safety nets) is definitely superior for pattern-matching, it's a different problem set, but a very valid one.
That's a really cool concept. Naively replacing words might work, but sometimes the context is needed. Maybe a model like gemini 2.5 flash lite would be fast enough but still maintain better context awareness?
At least for me, there's large value in consuming bigger volumes of Chinese to get me used to pattern-matching on the characters, as opposed to only reading a smaller amount of harder characters that I'm less likely to actually encounter