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  • python and palindromes

    - by tekknolagi
    i recently wrote a method to cycle through /usr/share/dict/words and return a list of palindromes using my ispalindrome(x) method here's some of the code...what's wrong with it? it just stalls for 10 minutes and then returns a list of all the words in the file def reverse(a): return a[::-1] def ispalindrome(a): b = reverse(a) if b.lower() == a.lower(): return True else: return False wl = open('/usr/share/dict/words', 'r') wordlist = wl.readlines() wl.close() for x in wordlist: if not ispalindrome(x): wordlist.remove(x) print wordlist

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  • How to code an efficient blacklist filter function in php?

    - by achairapart
    So, I have three arrays like this: [items] => Array ( [0] => Array ( [id] => someid [title] => sometitle [author] => someauthor ... ) ... ) and also a string with comma separated words to blacklist: $blacklist = "some,words,to,blacklist"; Now I need to match these words with (as they can be one of) id, title, author and show results accordingly. I was thinking of a function like this: $pattern = '('.strtr($blacklist, ",", "|").')'; // should return (some|words|etc) foreach ($items as $item) { if ( !preg_match($pattern,$item['id']) || !preg_match($pattern,$item['title']) || !preg_match($pattern,$item['author']) ) { // show item } } and I wonder if this is the most efficient way to filter the arrays or I should use something with strpos() or filter_var with FILTER_VALIDATE_REGEXP ... Note that this function is repeated per 3 arrays. However, each array will not contain more than 50 items.

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  • Keyword sorting algorithm

    - by Nai
    I have over 1000 surveys, many of which contains open-ended replies. I would like to be able to 'parse' in all the words and get a ranking of the most used words (disregarding common words) to spot a trend. How can I do this? Is there a program I can use? EDIT If a 3rd party solution is not available, it would be great if we can keep the discussion to microsoft technologies only. Cheers.

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  • Given a document select a relevant snippet.

    - by BCS
    When I ask a question here, the tool tips for the question returned by the auto search given the first little bit of the question, but a decent percentage of them don't give any text that is any more useful for understanding the question than the title. Does anyone have an idea about how to make a filter to trim out useless bits of a question? My first idea is to trim any leading sentences that contain only words in some list (for instance, stop words, plus words from the title, plus words from the SO corpus that have very weak correlation with tags, that is that are equally likely to occur in any question regardless of it's tags)

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  • Is there any way to configure what reCAPTCHA is actually displaying?

    - by trejder
    Is there any way to control, what kind of image is displayed to user in reCAPTCHA or what kind of puzzle he/she is required to solve? I noticed at least two significant changes to what reCAPTCHA is serving (and I must admit, that I don't much like these changes): For years reCAPTCHA was serving two words from scanned books and user was required to solve one of them. They were clearly readable (even those "second" ones, that could be ommitted) and with nearly no problem in solving them by a human. For past few month, I noticed a significant change at all of my sites, that are using reCAPTCHA. They started to show combination of computer-generated long numbers string and something, that looks for me as street/house number photographed in Google StreetView. They're even easier to solve, but what is most important -- it started to happen more and more often that user is obligated to solve both of them. Now, I have noticed another change/regression. Now some of my sites remain at so called "level 2" (like above) and some of them started to serve two words again ("level 1"?). And again, there are more and more situations, where solving both words is required. But, what is most important, on this "level" words are nearly impossible to solve (on my old mobile devices with 3.5'' display I need 5-6 attempts to pass on!). They're cluttered, written in some strange font, mostly in italics with a lot of black and white stains or drops on letters etc. Plus: reCAPTCHA stopped to be equal -- some of my pages are still serving "level2" while some of them are "killing" end users with a need to solve "level3". Is there anyway, I can control this -- force it to use only "level2" and on all my pages? (of course, I'm using exactly the same piece of code to serve reCAPTCHA on all my pages) Note, that I'm not asking for something like in this question. I don't want to change what reCAPTCHA shows (to disable words in favor of only numbers for example). I only want to control, which "version" of puzzles (among described above) reCAPTCHA shows and I want to make it equal on all my sites.

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  • How to check if a position inside a std string exists ?? (c++)

    - by yox
    Hello, i have a long string variable and i want to search in it for specific words and limit text according to thoses words. Say i have the following text : "This amazing new wearable audio solution features a working speaker embedded into the front of the shirt and can play music or sound effects appropriate for any situation. It's just like starring in your own movie" and the words : "solution" , "movie". I want to substract from the big string (like google in results page): "...new wearable audio solution features a working speaker embedded..." and "...just like starring in your own movie" for that i'm using the code : for (std::vector<string>::iterator it = words.begin(); it != words.end(); ++it) { int loc1 = (int)desc.find( *it, 0 ); if( loc1 != string::npos ) { while(desc.at(loc1-i) && i<=80){ i++; from=loc1-i; if(i==80) fromdots=true; } i=0; while(desc.at(loc1+(int)(*it).size()+i) && i<=80){ i++; to=loc1+(int)(*it).size()+i; if(i==80) todots=true; } for(int i=from;i<=to;i++){ if(fromdots) mini+="..."; mini+=desc.at(i); if(todots) mini+="..."; } } but desc.at(loc1-i) causes OutOfRange exception... I don't know how to check if that position exists without causing an exception ! Help please!

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  • Generating the permutations from a number of Characters

    - by adam08
    I'm working on a predictive text solution and have all the words being retrieved from a Trie based on input for a certain string of characters, i.e. "at" will give all words formed with "at" as a prefix. The problem that I have now, is that we are also supposed to return all other possibilities from pressing these 2 buttons, Button 2 and button 8 on the mobile phone, which would also give words formed with, "au, av, bt, bu, bv, ct, cu, cv" (most of which won't have any actual words. Can anyone suggest a solution and how I would go about doing this for calculating the different permutations? (at the moment, I'm prompting the user to enter the prefix (not using a GUI right now)

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  • concatenate arbitrary long list of matches in SQL subquery

    - by lordvlad
    imagine 2 tables (rather stupid example, but for the sake of simplicity, here you go) words word_id letters letter word_id how can i select all words while selecting all letters that belong to a word and concatenating them to said word? it is important that the letters are returned in the order they appear in the table, as the letter may be mixed into other words, but the order is correct. |word_id| |word_id|letter| +-------+ +-------+------+ | 1| | 1| H| | 2| | 2| B| | 2| Y| | 1| I| | 2| E| should return |word_id|word| +-------+----+ | 1| HI| | 2| BYE| any way to accomplish this in pure SQL?

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  • My java program seems to be skipping over the try{}, executing the catch{} and then throwing a NullPointerException. What should I do?

    - by Matt Bolopue
    I am writing a program that calculates the number of words, syllables, and sentences in any given text file. I don't need help finding those numbers, however my program (which currently should only find the number of words in the text file) will not import the text file even when I type in the name of the file correctly. The text file is in the same folder as the source code. Instead it tells me every time that what I typed in has the wrong file extension (see my catch{}) and then proceeds to throw a null pointer. I am at a loss for what could be causing it. Any suggestions? import java.io.*; import java.util.*; public class Reading_Lvl_Calc { /** * @param args */ public static void main(String[] args) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub int words = 0; String fileName; Scanner scan; Scanner keyread = new Scanner(System.in); System.out.println("Please enter a file name (or QUIT to exit)"); fileName = keyread.nextLine(); File doc = new File(fileName); //while(scan.equals(null)){ try { scan = new Scanner(doc); } catch(Exception e) { if(fileName.substring(fileName.indexOf(".")) != ".txt") System.out.println("I'm sorry, the file \"" + fileName + "\" has an invalid file extension."); else System.out.println("I am sorry, the file \"" + fileName + " \" cannot be found.\n The file must be in the same directory as this program"); scan = null; } // } while(scan.hasNext()){ words++; scan.next(); } System.out.println(words); } }

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  • please help me to solve problem

    - by davit-datuashvili
    first of all this is not homework and nobody tag it as homewrok i did not understand this porblem can anybody explain me?this is not english problem it is just misunderstanding what problem say Consider the problem of neatly printing a paragraph on a printer. The input text is a sequence of n words of lengths l1 , l2 , . . . , ln , measured in characters. We want to print this paragraph neatly on a number of lines that hold a maximum of M characters each. Our criterion of “neatness” is as follows. If a given line contains words i through j , where i = j , and we leave exactly one space between words, the number of extra space characters at the end of the line is M - j + i -(k=i,k< j,k++) lk , which must be nonnegative so that the words fit on the line. We wish to minimize the sum, over all lines except the last, of the cubes of the numbers of extra space characters at the ends of lines. Give a dynamic-programming algorithm to print a paragraph of n words neatly on a printer. Analyze the running time and space requirements of your algorithm.

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  • Help with algorithm to determine phrase occurrence in string in PHP

    - by Will M.
    I have an array of phrases (max 2 words) like $words = array('barack obama', 'chicago', 'united states'); and then I have a string like: $sentence = "Barack Obama is from Chicago. Barack Obama's favorite food it pizza."; I want to find/create an efficient algorithm that would return the number of occurrences of the words in the array $words in the string $sentence. In this case it would be: 'barack obama' => 2 'chicago' => 0 How can I built this?

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  • How to get all captures of subgroup matches with preg_match_all()?

    - by hakre
    Update/Note: I think what I'm probably looking for is to get the captures of a group in PHP. Referenced: PCRE regular expressions using named pattern subroutines. (Read carefully:) I have a string that contains a variable number of segments (simplified): $subject = 'AA BB DD '; // could be 'AA BB DD CC EE ' as well I would like now to match the segments and return them via the matches array: $pattern = '/^(([a-z]+) )+$/i'; $result = preg_match_all($pattern, $subject, $matches); This will only return the last match for the capture group 2: DD. Is there a way that I can retrieve all subpattern captures (AA, BB, DD) with one regex execution? Isn't preg_match_all suitable for this? This question is a generalization. Both the $subject and $pattern are simplified. Naturally with such the general list of AA, BB, .. is much more easy to extract with other functions (e.g. explode) or with a variation of the $pattern. But I'm specifically asking how to return all of the subgroup matches with the preg_...-family of functions. For a real life case imagine you have multiple (nested) level of a variant amount of subpattern matches. Example This is an example in pseudo code to describe a bit of the background. Imagine the following: Regular definitions of tokens: CHARS := [a-z]+ PUNCT := [.,!?] WS := [ ] $subject get's tokenized based on these. The tokenization is stored inside an array of tokens (type, offset, ...). That array is then transformed into a string, containing one character per token: CHARS -> "c" PUNCT -> "p" WS -> "s" So that it's now possible to run regular expressions based on tokens (and not character classes etc.) on the token stream string index. E.g. regex: (cs)?cp to express one or more group of chars followed by a punctuation. As I now can express self-defined tokens as regex, the next step was to build the grammar. This is only an example, this is sort of ABNF style: words = word | (word space)+ word word = CHARS+ space = WS punctuation = PUNCT If I now compile the grammar for words into a (token) regex I would like to have naturally all subgroup matches of each word. words = (CHARS+) | ( (CHARS+) WS )+ (CHARS+) # words resolved to tokens words = (c+)|((c+)s)+c+ # words resolved to regex I could code until this point. Then I ran into the problem that the sub-group matches did only contain their last match. So I have the option to either create an automata for the grammar on my own (which I would like to prevent to keep the grammar expressions generic) or to somewhat make preg_match working for me somehow so I can spare that. That's basically all. Probably now it's understandable why I simplified the question. Related: pcrepattern man page Get repeated matches with preg_match_all()

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  • Word frequency tally script is too slow

    - by Dave Jarvis
    Background Created a script to count the frequency of words in a plain text file. The script performs the following steps: Count the frequency of words from a corpus. Retain each word in the corpus found in a dictionary. Create a comma-separated file of the frequencies. The script is at: http://pastebin.com/VAZdeKXs Problem The following lines continually cycle through the dictionary to match words: for i in $(awk '{if( $2 ) print $2}' frequency.txt); do grep -m 1 ^$i\$ dictionary.txt >> corpus-lexicon.txt; done It works, but it is slow because it is scanning the words it found to remove any that are not in the dictionary. The code performs this task by scanning the dictionary for every single word. (The -m 1 parameter stops the scan when the match is found.) Question How would you optimize the script so that the dictionary is not scanned from start to finish for every single word? The majority of the words will not be in the dictionary. Thank you!

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  • Memory not being returned after function python call

    - by Dan
    I've got a function which does a parse of a sentence by building up a big chart. For some reason, Python holds on to whatever memory was allocated during that function call. That is, I do best = translate(sentence, grammar) and somehow my memory goes up and stays up. Here is the function: from string import join from heapq import nsmallest, heappush def translate(f, g): words = f.split() chart = {} for col in range(len(words)): for row in reversed(range(0,col+1)): # get rules for this subspan rules = g[join(words[row:col+1], ' ')] # ensure there's at least one rule on the diagonal if not rules and row==col: rules=[(0.0, join(words[row:col+1]))] # pick up rules below & to the left for k in range(row,col): if (row,k) and (k+1,col) in chart: for (w1, e1) in chart[row, k]: for (w2, e2) in chart[k+1,col]: heappush(rules, (w1+w2, e1+' '+e2)) # add all rules to chart chart[row,col] = nsmallest(MAX_TRANSLATIONS, rules) (w, best) = chart[0, len(words)-1][0] return best EDIT: Using Python 2.7 on OS X. The grammar g is just a dictionary from strings to heaps, e.g.: g['et'] [(1.05, 'and'), (6.92, ', and'), (9.95, 'and ,'), (11.17, 'and to')] EDIT: If you want to run the code, try the sentence "Cela est difficile" with the following grammar: >>> g['cela'] [(8.28, 'this'), (11.21, 'it'), (11.57, 'that'), (15.26, 'this ,')] >>> g['est'] [(2.69, 'is'), (10.21, 'is ,'), (11.15, 'has'), (11.28, ', is')] >>> g['difficile'] [(2.01, 'difficult'), (10.08, 'hard'), (10.19, 'difficult ,'), (10.57, 'a difficult')]

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  • program to determine number of duplicates in a sentence

    - by bhavna raghuvanshi
    public class duplicate { public static void main(String[] args)throws IOException { System.out.println("Enter words separated by spaces ('.' to quit):"); Set<String> s = new HashSet<String>(); Scanner input = new Scanner(System.in); while (true) { String token = input.next(); if (".".equals(token)) break; if (!s.add(token)) System.out.println("Duplicate detected: " + token); } System.out.println(s.size() + " distinct words:\n" + s); } } my program detects and prints duplicate words but i need to print the number of duplicate words also. pls help me do it.

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  • Javascript regular expressions: how to match ONLY the given characters?

    - by Dfowj
    I'm trying to use a regex like /[computer]{3,8}/ to get any words containing only the letters in computer ranging from 3 to 8 letters long. That regex instead captures all words containing ANY of the letters in [computer]. I've been looking at regular expression examples, but i can't quite figure it out... How do i modifiy this regular expression to capture words containing ONLY the letters in computer (with a length of 3 to 8)?

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  • how to organize classes in ruby if they are literal subclasses

    - by RetroNoodle
    I know that title didn't make sense, Im sorry! Its hard to word what I am trying to ask. I had trouble googling it for the same reason. So this isn't even Ruby specific, but I am working in ruby and I am new to it, so bear with me. So you have a class that is a document. Inside each document, you have sentences, and each sentence has words. Words will have properties, like "noun" or a count of how many times they are used in the document, etc. I would like each of the elements, document, sentence, word be an object. Now, if you think literally - sentences are in documents, and words are in sentences. Should this be organized literally like this as well? Like inside the document class you will define and instantiate the sentence objects, and inside the sentence class you will define and instantiate the words? Or, should everything be separate and reference each other? Like the word class would sit outside the sentence class but the sentence class would be able to instantiate and work with words? This is a basic OOP question I guess, and I suppose you could argue to do it either way. What do you guys think? Each sentence in the document could be stored in a hash of sentence objects inside the document object, and each word in the sentence could be stored in a hash of word objects inside the sentence. I dont want to code myself into a corner here, thats why I am asking, plus I have wondered this before in other situations. Thank you!

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  • Using a "white list" for extracting terms for Text Mining

    - by [email protected]
    In Part 1 of my post on "Generating cluster names from a document clustering model" (part 1, part 2, part 3), I showed how to build a clustering model from text documents using Oracle Data Miner, which automates preparing data for text mining. In this process we specified a custom stoplist and lexer and relied on Oracle Text to identify important terms.  However, there is an alternative approach, the white list, which uses a thesaurus object with the Oracle Text CTXRULE index to allow you to specify the important terms. INTRODUCTIONA stoplist is used to exclude, i.e., black list, specific words in your documents from being indexed. For example, words like a, if, and, or, and but normally add no value when text mining. Other words can also be excluded if they do not help to differentiate documents, e.g., the word Oracle is ubiquitous in the Oracle product literature. One problem with stoplists is determining which words to specify. This usually requires inspecting the terms that are extracted, manually identifying which ones you don't want, and then re-indexing the documents to determine if you missed any. Since a corpus of documents could contain thousands of words, this could be a tedious exercise. Moreover, since every word is considered as an individual token, a term excluded in one context may be needed to help identify a term in another context. For example, in our Oracle product literature example, the words "Oracle Data Mining" taken individually are not particular helpful. The term "Oracle" may be found in nearly all documents, as with the term "Data." The term "Mining" is more unique, but could also refer to the Mining industry. If we exclude "Oracle" and "Data" by specifying them in the stoplist, we lose valuable information. But it we include them, they may introduce too much noise. Still, when you have a broad vocabulary or don't have a list of specific terms of interest, you rely on the text engine to identify important terms, often by computing the term frequency - inverse document frequency metric. (This is effectively a weight associated with each term indicating its relative importance in a document within a collection of documents. We'll revisit this later.) The results using this technique is often quite valuable. As noted above, an alternative to the subtractive nature of the stoplist is to specify a white list, or a list of terms--perhaps multi-word--that we want to extract and use for data mining. The obvious downside to this approach is the need to specify the set of terms of interest. However, this may not be as daunting a task as it seems. For example, in a given domain (Oracle product literature), there is often a recognized glossary, or a list of keywords and phrases (Oracle product names, industry names, product categories, etc.). Being able to identify multi-word terms, e.g., "Oracle Data Mining" or "Customer Relationship Management" as a single token can greatly increase the quality of the data mining results. The remainder of this post and subsequent posts will focus on how to produce a dataset that contains white list terms, suitable for mining. CREATING A WHITE LIST We'll leverage the thesaurus capability of Oracle Text. Using a thesaurus, we create a set of rules that are in effect our mapping from single and multi-word terms to the tokens used to represent those terms. For example, "Oracle Data Mining" becomes "ORACLEDATAMINING." First, we'll create and populate a mapping table called my_term_token_map. All text has been converted to upper case and values in the TERM column are intended to be mapped to the token in the TOKEN column. TERM                                TOKEN DATA MINING                         DATAMINING ORACLE DATA MINING                  ORACLEDATAMINING 11G                                 ORACLE11G JAVA                                JAVA CRM                                 CRM CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT    CRM ... Next, we'll create a thesaurus object my_thesaurus and a rules table my_thesaurus_rules: CTX_THES.CREATE_THESAURUS('my_thesaurus', FALSE); CREATE TABLE my_thesaurus_rules (main_term     VARCHAR2(100),                                  query_string  VARCHAR2(400)); We next populate the thesaurus object and rules table using the term token map. A cursor is defined over my_term_token_map. As we iterate over  the rows, we insert a synonym relationship 'SYN' into the thesaurus. We also insert into the table my_thesaurus_rules the main term, and the corresponding query string, which specifies synonyms for the token in the thesaurus. DECLARE   cursor c2 is     select token, term     from my_term_token_map; BEGIN   for r_c2 in c2 loop     CTX_THES.CREATE_RELATION('my_thesaurus',r_c2.token,'SYN',r_c2.term);     EXECUTE IMMEDIATE 'insert into my_thesaurus_rules values                        (:1,''SYN(' || r_c2.token || ', my_thesaurus)'')'     using r_c2.token;   end loop; END; We are effectively inserting the token to return and the corresponding query that will look up synonyms in our thesaurus into the my_thesaurus_rules table, for example:     'ORACLEDATAMINING'        SYN ('ORACLEDATAMINING', my_thesaurus)At this point, we create a CTXRULE index on the my_thesaurus_rules table: create index my_thesaurus_rules_idx on        my_thesaurus_rules(query_string)        indextype is ctxsys.ctxrule; In my next post, this index will be used to extract the tokens that match each of the rules specified. We'll then compute the tf-idf weights for each of the terms and create a nested table suitable for mining.

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  • New DMF for SQL Server 2008 sys.dm_fts_parser to parse a string

    Many times we want to split a string into an array and get a list of each word separately. The sys.dm_fts_parser function will help us in these cases. More over, this function will also differentiate the noise words and exact match words. The sys.dm_fts_parser can be also very powerful for debugging purposes. It can help you check how the word breaker and stemmer works for a given input for Full Text Search.

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  • Author Bio on all pages - Is it duplicate content?

    - by Rana Prathap
    In a website with user generated content, I provide a author bio under every article on the site. The author bio will be the same under every article the same author wrote. For some authors, the author bio is no longer then a couple of sentences, but for some descriptive writers, it is a good 100 words. These 100 words get repeated in almost 15 pages, some of them without substantial original content(such as haikus). Will this lead to duplicate content?

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  • Experiences with learning Chinese

    - by Greg Low
    I've had a few friends asking me about learning Chinese and what I've found works and doesn't work. I was answering a question on a mailing list today and I thought I should post this info where it might be useful to many. The question that was initially asked was whether Rosetta Stone was useful but I've provided much more info on learning the language here. I’ve used Rosetta Stone with Chinese but it’s really hard to know whether to recommend it or not. Rosetta Stone works the same way in all languages. They show you photos and then let you both see and hear the target language and get you to work out what they’re talking about. The thinking is that that’s how children learn. However, at first, I found it very frustrating. I’d be staring at photos trying to work out what they were really trying to get at. Sometimes it’s far from obvious. I could not have survived without Google Translate open at the same time. The other weird thing is that the photos are from a mixture of countries. While that’s good in a way, it also means that they are endlessly showing pictures of something that would never happen in the target language and culture. For any language, constant interaction with a speaker of the target language is needed. Rosetta Stone has a “Studio” option. That’s the best part of the program. In my case, it lets me connect around twice a week to a live online class from Beijing. Classes usually have the teacher plus two to four students. You get some Studio access with the initial packages but need to purchase it for ongoing use. I find it very inexpensive. It seems to work out to about $70 (AUD/USD) for six months. That’s a real bargain. The other downside to Rosetta Stone is that they tend to teach very formal language, but as with other languages, that’s not how the locals speak. It might have been correct at one point but no-one actually says that. As an example, Rosetta Stone teach Gonggòng qìche (pronounced roughly like “gong gong chee chure” for bus. Most of my friends from areas like Taiwan would just say Gongche. Google Translate says Zongxiàn (pronounced somewhat like “dzong sheean”) instead. Mind you, the Rosetta Stone option isn't really as bad as "omnibus"; it's more like saying "public bus". If you say the option they provide, people would understand you. I also listen to ChinesePod in the car. They also have SpanishPod. Each podcast is about five minutes of spoken conversation. It is very good for providing current language. Another resource I use is local Meetup groups. Most cities have these and for a variety of languages. It’s way less structured (just standard conversation) but good for getting interaction. The obvious challenge for Asian languages is reading/writing. The input editors for Chinese that are part of Windows are excellent. Many of my Chinese friends speak fluently but cannot read or write. I was determined to learn to do both. For writing, I’m talking about on a computer, not with a pen. (Mind you, I can barely write English with a pen nowadays). When using Rosetta Stone, you can choose to have the Chinese words displayed in pinyin (Wo xihuan xuéxí zhongguó) or in Chinese characters (???????) or both. This year, I’ve been forcing myself to just use the Chinese characters. I use a pinyin input editor in Windows though, as it’s very fast.  (The character recognition input in the iPad is also amazing). Notice from the example that I provided above that the pronunciation of the pinyin isn’t that obvious to us at first either.  Since changing to only using characters, I find I can now read many more Chinese characters fluently. It’s a major challenge though. I can read about 300 now and yet you need around 2,500 to be able to read a newspaper fairly well. Tones are a major issue for some Asian languages. Mandarin has four tones (plus a neutral tone) and there is a major difference in meaning between two words that are spelled the same in pinyin but with different tones. For example, Ma (3rd tone?) is a horse, Ma (1st tone?) is like “mom”, and ma (neutral tone?) is a question mark and so on. Clearly you don’t want to mix these up. As in English, they also have words that do sound the same but mean different things in different contexts. What’s interesting is that even though we see two words that differ only by tone as very similar, to a native speaker, if you say the right words with the wrong tone, you might as well have said a completely different word. My wife’s dialect of Chinese has eight tones. It’s much worse. The reason I’m so keen to learn to read/write Chinese is that even though the different dialects are pronounced so differently that speakers of one dialect often cannot understand another dialect, the writing is generally the same. The only difference is that many years ago, the Chinese government created a simplified set of characters for some of the most commonly used ones. Older Chinese and most Cantonese speakers often struggle with the simplified characters. This is the simplified form of “three apples”: ????   This is the traditional form of the same words: ????  Note that two of the characters are the same but the middle two are quite different. For most languages, the best thing is to watch current movies in the target language but to watch them with the target language as subtitles, not your native language. You want to know what they actually said, not what it roughly means (which is what the English subtitle would give you). The difficulty with Asian languages like Chinese is that you have the added challenge of understanding the subtitles when they are written in the target language. I wish there were Mandarin Chinese movies with pinyin subtitles. For learning to read characters, I also recommend HanCard on the iPad. It is targeted at the HSK language proficiency levels. (I’m intending to take the first HSK exam as soon as I’m ready). Hope that info helps someone get started.  

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  • Keyword Focus - But Find Top Keywords For Your Next Article

    Long tail words or words with more then two keywords to base an article on are a method used by some online marketers to gain traffic. Although these keywords of 3-4 keywords do gain a trickle of traffic, the visitors to your site who use this many keywords to find you, are usually very ready to buy since they are usually looking for a specific term.

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  • SEO - The Best Means to Have Visitors!

    Keywords are the words relevant to the subject of your site searching which, any person can land on to your site. They could be any word pertaining to the product or service provided by your portal. Related words are said for, if a person reaches your site searching for something not offered by your site, it would be a waste. Search engines are the websites where any internet user, not knowing of the sites providing a product or service, gets to know all the available sites.

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  • The Magic of Keywords

    When you ask this question of the search engines, there are many definitions all meaning the same thing. The one I liked the best is "Keywords are the words or phrases used in a Web Page that will be noticed and indexed by Search Engines, and guide people to your web site when they type in those words or phrases at the Search Engine." In fact keywords are a very necessary part of an internet marketer's resources, if you want people to find and read what you have written or advertised.

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