If you're ever vibe coding, and you're there waiting for your threads to return, and you're looking for meaningful work to engage with in the meantime, and you want to optimize your token throughput to not waste any of the tokens you're paying for, you might want to consider learning Chinese using the-big-learn:
Instead of going through phrase book basics like ni hao and xie xie, you start with the real thing. Da Xue. The Great Learning. The first of the Four Books, which are in the Confucian tradition. Every line is stored in six layers — simplified, traditional, pinyin, zhuyin, char-by-char English gloss, and holistic translation — so you can read continuously without breaking flow to look things up.
With every side-by side Chinese and English line, the /the-big-learn-guided-reading skill shows you the char-by-char phonetics and English gloss. Then you draft a translation. The AI reads it and tells you where you're right, where you're wrong, and why. You can revise if you want. Then you respond to the line. It reads again. You go back and forth until you've actually understood the line — not memorized someone else's English sentence, but built the meaning yourself from the characters on the page. Then the system saves your personal translation. Your version. Then the next line. This is the core loop.
Ask questions about the line you're on. Any question. What does 止 mean here? Why is 於 used instead of 在? Why did Confucius start with this? Get answers immediately, in the same conversation, and return to reading.
Hit a character you don't recognize. Explode it using the /the-big-learn-explode-char skill. 明 → 日 + 月, sun + moon = bright. See what else those components build — 日 also appears in 早 (early), 晚 (late), 時 (time). See the compound words where it actually lives in modern Chinese: 明白 (understand, "bright-white"), 說明 (explain, "speak-bright"), 發明 (invent, "emit-bright"). Then homophones, synonyms and antonyms
The curriculum starts with the Four Books — Da Xue, Zhong Yong, Lunyu, Mengzi — then opens into Sunzi Bingfa, Daodejing, Sanzijing, Qianziwen, Sanguo Yanyi, and a thousand idioms. Source-first, not situation-first. Foundational texts give you the structural skeleton that makes the culture make sense.
geometerJones•3d ago
https://github.com/geometer-jones/the-big-learn
Instead of going through phrase book basics like ni hao and xie xie, you start with the real thing. Da Xue. The Great Learning. The first of the Four Books, which are in the Confucian tradition. Every line is stored in six layers — simplified, traditional, pinyin, zhuyin, char-by-char English gloss, and holistic translation — so you can read continuously without breaking flow to look things up.
With every side-by side Chinese and English line, the /the-big-learn-guided-reading skill shows you the char-by-char phonetics and English gloss. Then you draft a translation. The AI reads it and tells you where you're right, where you're wrong, and why. You can revise if you want. Then you respond to the line. It reads again. You go back and forth until you've actually understood the line — not memorized someone else's English sentence, but built the meaning yourself from the characters on the page. Then the system saves your personal translation. Your version. Then the next line. This is the core loop.
Ask questions about the line you're on. Any question. What does 止 mean here? Why is 於 used instead of 在? Why did Confucius start with this? Get answers immediately, in the same conversation, and return to reading.
Hit a character you don't recognize. Explode it using the /the-big-learn-explode-char skill. 明 → 日 + 月, sun + moon = bright. See what else those components build — 日 also appears in 早 (early), 晚 (late), 時 (time). See the compound words where it actually lives in modern Chinese: 明白 (understand, "bright-white"), 說明 (explain, "speak-bright"), 發明 (invent, "emit-bright"). Then homophones, synonyms and antonyms
The curriculum starts with the Four Books — Da Xue, Zhong Yong, Lunyu, Mengzi — then opens into Sunzi Bingfa, Daodejing, Sanzijing, Qianziwen, Sanguo Yanyi, and a thousand idioms. Source-first, not situation-first. Foundational texts give you the structural skeleton that makes the culture make sense.