My AI writing assistant for Chinese
Hi HN! In trying to improve my Chinese skills, I built this tool that lets me write a mix of Chinese and English, then recommends a proper Chinese expression. This is super helpful when I want to write something in Chinese but I don't know all the vocab/grammar - I can enter my best effort and use English for the parts I don't know. Really, the fundamental benefit of the tool is that it encourages me to exercise the writing muscle, rather than defaulting to translating from English. My goal was to build something that is fast, relatively inexpensive, and not prone to misleading people.…
In plain words
My AI Writing Assistant for Chinese is a tool that helps users improve their Chinese writing skills by allowing them to write in a mix of Chinese and English, then receive recommendations for proper Chinese expressions. It is designed for language learners who want to practice writing without relying on direct English-to-Chinese translation. The tool uses GPT-3.5 paired with Microsoft machine translation to generate suggestions, focusing on being fast, affordable, and accurate rather than encouraging lazy translation habits.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN! In trying to improve my Chinese skills, I built this tool that lets me write a mix of Chinese and English, then recommends a proper Chinese expression. This is super helpful when I want to write something in Chinese but I don't know all the vocab/grammar - I can enter my best effort and use English for the parts I don't know. Really, the fundamental benefit of the tool is that it encourages me to exercise the writing muscle, rather than defaulting to translating from English. My goal was to build something that is fast, relatively inexpensive, and not prone to misleading people. After some experimentation, I found that pairing GPT-3.5 with Microsoft machine translation works great! I'm using GPT-3.5 to generate an English version of the input, then Microsoft machine translation to translate the English version into Chinese. I've written a blog post about how I arrived at this approach: https://maybecoding.bearblog.dev/my-attempt-at-an-ai-writing... The tool is pretty basic from a technical standpoint. There's a PHP backend that handles the API calls to OpenAI and Microsoft. The frontend is plain HTML with a bit of JS for interactivity - but the whole thing works fine without JS. Hopefully other folks find this useful too. I'm interested to know whether I could have approached this problem in a different/better way. Thanks!
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