Okay, so I was trying to mess around with counting Chinese characters the other day. You know, just to see how many unique ones are in a piece of text. I thought, “Hey, this can’t be that hard, right?” I mean, there’s gotta be some simple tool out there that can do this for me.
First, I tried just Googling it, like anyone would. “How to count Chinese characters” or something like that. I stumbled upon a few online tools, but they were kind of janky. The first one I tried gave me some weird error message, “DIM failed to load” it said. What’s that even mean? I just wanted to count some characters, not debug some website.
Then, I found another one that looked promising. It had a simple text box where you could paste your text. I copied a paragraph from a Chinese news article I was reading and pasted it in. I hit the “count” button and waited. And waited. It was just stuck there, loading. I’m not the most patient guy, so after a few minutes, I gave up on that one too.
- Tried Googling for online tools
- First tool gave a weird “DIM failed to load” error
- Second tool just kept loading forever
I started thinking, maybe I need something more robust. Maybe a little program I can run on my own computer. I did some more digging and found this Java applet thing. Sounded a bit technical, but I figured I’d give it a shot. I’m not a programmer, but I can usually follow instructions.
Diving into Java Applets
Well, let me tell you, this Java thing was a whole other can of worms. I had to download some extra software, mess with some settings, and it still wouldn’t work properly. It was supposed to convert between different character encodings or something, GB, GBK, Big5, UTF-8, who knows what all that means. I just wanted to see my character count, man!
After wasting a good chunk of my afternoon on this, I was about ready to throw in the towel. I decided to give it one last shot and looked for some kind of library or something in a programming language I’m slightly familiar with. I found some mentions of a “General Standard Chinese Characters” table. Apparently, there’s this list of like 8105 characters, and the first 6500 are considered common.
Finally after a lot of trials, I got it. And you just input your text then hit a button, it will show you how many characters in the text. Pretty cool, right?
Anyway, that’s my little adventure in the world of Chinese character counting. It was way more of a hassle than I expected, but hey, I learned a few things along the way. It just shows that sometimes the simplest tasks can turn into a whole ordeal.