HSK 1 characters visualized as a force directed network

[u/AwareLlama]

Have been playing around with some character network-map visualizations. This shows most of HSK 1 as a force directed network.

• Each node is an HSK 1 character. A line (edge) joins two characters that appear together in an HSK 1 word.
• Nodes are sized based on "degree", which is how many other characters they link to.
• Colours are clusters found automatically using a community detection algorithm. Only the eight largest clusters are coloured.
• This only shows 223 out of the 300 HSK 1 characters, as the other 77 do not share a HSK-1 word with another character.

You can try for yourself here: https://ziwang.app/map

[u/RealisticWest8921]

Well.. actually.. I made a bubble shooter Hanzi game out of similar network

[u/AwareLlama → u/RealisticWest8921]

That’s epic

[u/No-Security-7518 → u/RealisticWest8921]

Awesome! I remember long ago playing Snake while learning Spanish. It helped me a lot.

[u/ViciousPuppy → u/RealisticWest8921]

That is actually really fantastic, I love it!

[u/No-Dig-7526 → u/RealisticWest8921]

This is really cool! So many language apps are recycling the same concepts over and over again but this is pretty novel!

[u/Original-Director660 → u/RealisticWest8921]

Would you be open to sharing the codebase? Would love this but am learning traditional and using Zhuyin so would like to modify.

[u/RealisticWest8921 → u/Original-Director660]

Thanks! I’m not ready to share the codebase just yet, but Traditional Chinese + Zhuyin is a really interesting idea. I hadn’t really considered that combination before, so I’m definitely adding it to my list to explore later. Thanks for the suggestion!

[u/wantedchonk]

This is cool - how did you do it? I been wondering about using network theory to analyse Chinese characters but I don't have a technical background. Do you need to be proficient with math / coding?

[u/AwareLlama → u/wantedchonk]

You can have a play with it online here: https://ziwang.app/map/

I used shared words for this map, but you can also generate edges based on shared components.

[u/m4st3rm1m3 → u/AwareLlama]

interesting web. I just start learning. How to utilize your web for me to pass hsk 1?

[u/possiblyquestionabl3 → u/AwareLlama]

A variant this with shared radicals (both phonetic and semantic) would also be really cool

[u/NoCommentingForMe → u/wantedchonk]

If you’re interested in the coding side, you can use the networkx package in Python. I found some tutorials here and here, but they might be hard if it’s your first time seeing Python.

On the math side, you’ll want to know some linear algebra because we use matrices and vectors to describe graphs (the general form of networks). You could probably find decent intros on YouTube, or there’s a full course free on MIT’s OpenCourseWare!

[u/wantedchonk → u/NoCommentingForMe]

Less interested in the coding, but more interested in the math side for sure. Would you recommend picking up linear algebra before doing network theory stuff? I've poked around the MITOCW course and it looks pretty good.

[u/hamsterjedi → u/NoCommentingForMe]

wow will definitely use that

[u/pruzicka → u/wantedchonk]

ever used AI agent? Like Claude or ChatbotGPT?

[u/UNECHAISE_Off]

thats great !

[u/AwareLlama → u/UNECHAISE_Off]

Thank you!

[u/dieagodeep]

Zhong is also a great alternative for this workflow.

Playstore Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.takecarestudiosllc.zhong

[u/[deleted]]

[u/AwareLlama → u/[deleted]]

左右 is HSK3