I’m lazy.

Someone said “Good developers are lazy”. I think it could be applied to language learning.

I’m learning chinese. Which is one of the worst languages to pick if you’re not chinese. 2200 hours of learning, when italian or english would require 600 hours !

So, in order to read texts in Chinese without learning all the characters (汉字 － hanzi ： character), I wanted to know which characters appeared the most in a given text, learn them and get most of the text for a minimal amount of work.

I thus decided to develop this small script (which has the side effect of improving my feeble JS skills) :

See the Pen Get the most used characters in a text by Pierre (@Marekje) on CodePen.

How-to : Change the text in the id="text", in the HTML tab, , and automagically see which characters occurs most often.

It was fun to do ! Now I need to use my design skills and make that more user-friendly :–)