I've lived in Taiwan for almost 3 years, and tried many ways to learn to read. Studying characters is almost a distraction. Even if you can read half a characte

I've lived in Taiwan for almost 3 years, and tried many ways to learn to read. Studying characters is almost a distraction. Even if you can read half a character, you can't guess the pronunciation or the meaning. (but with my upcoming program, you will be able to find the combined character from the parts). Words are much more important. Chinese has words, there are just no spaces. "如果" is a word. The meaning of the characters "如" (such as) "果" (fruit) is totally different to the word (in case). Soon I'll be releasing a program to do automatic word spacing, literal translation of each word, bopomofo, and more. The code is finished, I'm just writing the documentation now, and then put it onto my Facebook. When I get simplified characters working, I'll release it here on Hacker News.