STUDY WITH ALFONS

“These are the hardest problems humans have every solved in engineering.” – gorklon rust.

I think about this quote by Elon Musk often. I don’t know what it really means, though. I can’t imagine the problems they face at SpaceX. I struggle just to push my 200-pound galvanized steel Feldenkrais table a few inches. I can’t begin to imagine what it takes to push 5,000 metric tons of steel into orbit.

Furthermore, I often think of a quote by Jony Ive, the former Apple lead designer. He said something similar, that they had to solve incredibly hard design problems. And in the end, Apple product users don’t even know that there was anything to solve, because the seemingly simple solution doesn’t show the complexity of the original problem.

A friend once told me to always compare yourself up, never down. Always strive upwards, always reach for the stars. I guess that’s what I’m doing here. Anyways, what I wanted to share is this:

After having pushed pixels around for what doesn’t seem like days, but, like, forever, and then some, and having thought long and hard about how to solve this-and-that problem during several long walks and showers, I finally came up with a design I can agree with.

Looking very much forward to the final implementation, so that I can start using it myself. Not so much looking forward to the implementation work itself; I start to feel tired of day-in-day-out software engineering. On the upside, the vibe coding part of it is quite fun. For once, I’m the one who knocks, lol…

I’m starting to be afraid of my project, and of myself. I just wanted to write a little tool that’s less annoying than Google translate, or ChatGPT, or DeepSeek, when it comes to transcribing Chinese characters into Hànyǔ Pīnyīn. I just didn’t want to see the same rookie mistakes made over and over again, stubbornly made without any hope for improvement, not any time soon anyway.

So I sat down to write this little tool. And with Grok xAi, and a bit of ChatGPT, and a couple of amazing open source libraries (such as rakutenMA and LibreTranslate) it’s actually quite convenient to lay down a bit of code.

But, alas. Lo-and-behold. What a monster I have created! Hundreds of hours of work, thousands of lines of code. Have a look at a snapshot of the user interface:

This is how it looks now. You drop your text written in Chinese characters in the top left, and get Hànyǔ Pīnyīn on the right, and all the tools you need to manipulate and re-arrange the final text. Terribly beautiful. A complex task made ease.

There’s still a few quirks, and quite a few rules to implement and to improve, to make it (almost) compliant with GB/T 16159-2012 — but I already love to use it, and love to use it over anything else.

However… it’s a lost cause from the start: modern text segmentation and tokenisation tools operate with 70 to 98% accuracy. Some sentences come out better than others, before I try to fix the mistakes. But it will never be 100%.

And some years later, when Baidu, Alibaba and Google, etc, finally jump on the Pīnyīn-train, my software will be obsolete. Yet, I started this, fully aware of its transitoriness. A little bit crazy. But beautiful.

O. M. G. – in my obsessive spree (that rhymes!) I moved on to create yet another tool in the field of Hànyǔ Pīnyīn! Now I have like 7 projects parallel in the cooking, er, kitchen… in the making! …is what I’m saying!

This one was a really tuff cookie. I had many problems to solve. It took me the better part of the entire month. Next to sleeping – and a daily short session of self-Feldenkrais for self-preservation – there was not much else I did. But here I am, here we are!

My transcription tool, even in its early prototype stage, is already on par with Google translate, ChatGPT and Deepseek… Deepseek! of all large language models, in terms of transcription quality — which is not very difficult because they are very sloppy in this regard; nobody seems to care about Pīnyīn orthography, not even the machinese.

I use the Made-In-Japan rakutenMA for segmentation (which works in any browser and is purely javascript based), paired with some simple lookups from creative commons dictionary CC-CEDICT (which is second by a wide margin to the great ABC-Dictionary by Hawaii Press, but it’s all we have for now, and for that I’m grateful), a frequency based table for single character Chinese morphemes, and a smooth working user interface (overall design still needs to be created.)

Next, I will need to focus on my actual work as a Feldenkrais teacher, for the last week of the month, and produce two Feldenkrais videos. Despite my crazy work hours due to my software projects, I still need to pay the rent. The upcoming two videos will probably be the slowest and deepest I’ve produced so far in the past 15 years; I hope to be able to get closer to live-class experience in my videos.

For the theme of the upcoming video, I’ve made my pick in the beginning of the month already (dealing with lingering shoulder pain due to sitting in front of the computer too much). Looking forward to teaching and filming!

And then, next month, I will start implementing the official government rules (GB/T 16159-2012) for Hànyǔ Pīnyīn into my new transcription software, making it the best in the world, second to none!

Also, I’m planing to wrap my colorful Pīnyīn Colors app into a MacOS app, or maybe even an iPad app, register and pay for an Apple developer account (walk of shame), and put it on the Apple App-Store (for free, as most of my work is, so is my plan.)

Ok, now, no time to proof-read, ok, but just one run through, no time Toulouse, I need to get on with it!

What a crazy past 2-3 months! Almost every day I was working for up to 10 or even 14 hours on my projects about Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese. I’ve produced quite a few projects:

• it started with a grammar book, which then lead to
• several apps,
• several typing and input helpers,
• including a unique, highly innovative typing helper to write in Pīnyīn without numbers and selection boxes,
• a dictionary filter and dictionary interface,
• I even put Pīnyīn diacritics on a font,
• and worked on several algorithms.

Algorithms, algorithms everywhere

For example, my algorithm for coloring vowels (or vowel groups) in HTML containers: what started as a lagging, heavy, cumbersome-to-use prototype (as shown in a previous post), is now a blazingly fast algorithm that can handle tens of thousands of words, on large canvas.

As a surprising side-effect, this unleashed the potential to play with Chinese words and text in an artistic way, in a way hardly ever done before, because the means simply didn’t exist before.

Here’s a list of all 8-letter Chinese words that contain syllables (or words) that sound like »yào« — or at least, all the words listed in the CC-CEDICT dictionary. Sorted with PinyinAbcSort, my algorithm that can sort Hànyǔ Pīnyīn (fast).

This must be the Austrian Viennese blood boiling inside of me, this innovative, unconventional play with language and words, a genetic feature that suddenly, unexpectedly, rose up to get hold of me and my senses.

And I can’t stop. It’s like writing a novel. The story unfolds. The story pushes me, the writer, forwards, manically, unceasingly, like in a fever dream. But instead of plots and chapters, I produce product designs and prototypes.

But to what ends? Where does this lead to? This is becoming far too big for me.

Today I’ve spent almost the entire day, from 7:30 am to 22:20 pm, working on my coloring of vowels. Fun. Borderline crazy. Total obsession. But I guess that’s the only way to get things done.

And I have to say, it’s b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l ! A total beauty. I love it.

The most difficut part was to get the text to copy. That’s probably something anyone is taking for granted. Copy, Paste, Print. But to get “copy the whole page into the clipboard” to work, that alone did cost me around 8 hours, and I had to leave it at copying the whole page. I tried a many ways, and also a few well-established 3rd party solutions (such as highlightjs and quilljs) but to no avail. At times I felt a bit like Bilbo in the Mirkwood – with some Elves somewhere having a picknick, singing merry tunes all along.

On the upside, it now copies nicely into rich text apps like Apple Pages and TextEdit – and maybe even Microsoft Word (who knows?) – and there the colored text can be printed or edited further.

You can play with Pīnyīn Tone Vowel Coloring here: alfonsgrabher.com/pinyin-colors