https://probably.world/A blog about cool projects. 2022-02-28T11:20:21-05:00 Darren Zhu https://probably.world/ Jekyll © 2022 Darren Zhu /assets/media/icons/favicon.ico /assets/media/icons/favicon-96x96.png 2022-02-28T07:30:00-05:00 2022-02-28T01:36:59-05:00 https://probably.world/posts/learning-traditional-chinese-1/ Darren Zhu

Foreword Today, I will try to endeavour into the world of traditional Chinese as part of a (likely) series of blog posts about improving my Chinese abilities. Although I grew up in Beijing, I attended various international schools since entering grade school. Furthermore, after (unexpectedly) spending last two years in the States, I am beginning to lose my Chinese skills, which were, admittedl...

2022-02-21T07:30:00-05:00 2022-02-28T01:36:59-05:00 https://probably.world/posts/memorizing-100-perfect-squares/ Darren Zhu

Whether you love Number Theory, math competitions, or just have an affinity for numbers, there are many reasons why you would want to familiarize with perfect square numbers: numbers of the form $ x^2 $ where $ x $ is a positive integer. I memorized squares up to $ 20^2 = 400 $ in elementary school, and stopped thereafter. However, recently I thought maybe I would want to extend my knowledge of...

2022-02-21T07:30:00-05:00 2022-02-28T01:36:59-05:00 https://probably.world/posts/cistercian-numerals/ Darren Zhu

A while ago, I came across this fascinating YouTube video by Numberphile about a number system called Cistercian Numerals. They were developed used by the Cistercian monastic order, a Catholic religious order of monks that spanned Europe, between the 13th and 15th centuries. Use of Cistercian numerals outside of the monastic order continued intermittently until the early twentieth century. It w...

2022-02-14T07:30:00-05:00 2022-02-28T01:17:30-05:00 https://probably.world/posts/zhuyin-101-zh/ Darren Zhu

点击这里查看英文版文章。 注音符号（zhù yīn fú hào，ㄓㄨˋ ㄧㄣ ㄈㄨˊ ㄏㄠˋ）另称“bopomofo”，是现代汉语的标音系统之一，除了可以标注普通话，也可以用来标注其他汉语方言，例如闽南话。注音创立于二十世纪初（中华民国时期），虽然现今已大致被拼音取代，但在字典中还能看到。截至目前，注音依然是台湾的首要拼写系统。1 严格来讲，注音并不是字母，而是半音节表（Semi-syllabary）。周边的亚洲语言中，日语假名是一种音节表的标引系统，几乎每一个假名都代表了一个声母和一个韵母，并且同声母或同韵母的符号之间没有关联性。反观韩语的拼写系统，虽然看似一堆字符，但其实是一种字母拼写系统，每个音节的字母使用复杂的规矩纵向排列。注音前面的声母为字母体系而后面的韵母为半音节系统：例如注音的an为韵母ㄢ，而ang为韵母ㄤ，但两个符号之间没有任何关系。 绝大多数人认为，对我们这...

2022-02-07T07:30:00-05:00 2022-02-28T01:17:30-05:00 https://probably.world/posts/zhuyin-101-en/ Darren Zhu

Here is the Chinese version of this article. Zhuyin (Chinese: 注音, Pinyin: zhù yīn, Zhuyin: ㄓㄨˋ ㄧㄣ), also known as Bopomofo (which comes from its first four characters), is a Chinese transcription system that is capable of transcribing all the sounds of standard Mandarin Chinese, although it could also be used to transcribe other dialects of Chinese such as Taiwanese Hokkien. First introduced...