My project over the last few weeks has been to make my “Hamiltonian Method” interlinear reader program. Years ago, on the how-to-learn-any-language.com forum, there was a zany character who came up with the Listening Reading method that intrigued me. At the time I tried to piece together the elements for attempting this with Mandarin. With the resources I scoured up at the time (refer to my super old audiobook post), I felt lucky to find one of the only books with exactly matching audio: Anna Karenina.
As a person who tends to work on super tedious tasks, I started trying to make an aligned word document of the Chinese and English versions. This was probably a useless task, because I think it’s hard to use the method w/o pinyin or some alphabetic system. This may even be a form of procrastination, where I spend significant time and energy making resources but not using them.
In the present, I have discovered this ancient form of procrastination — this time with the power of AI:
So now I have scaffolding to read through The Hobbit in Mandarin without as much pain dealing with Chinese characters.
This is something I want to commercialize, as the tool is becoming good, but I need to start churning along with the business side of it. Public domain is fine, but actual books w/ any kind of modern translation under copyright are a no go.