NoInkling

Temporal.

Yeah a lot of these popular libraries - including Moment, Luxon, Day.js - commit the sin of using a single type of object for distinct concepts. Absolute time, civil time? Basically the same thing right? Just shoehorn them both in.

The IANA timezone database does occasionally revise historical rules when relevant information comes to light. So you might have calculated that some historical figure died at such-and-such a time UTC (based on a documented local time), but actually that's inaccurate and you might not know because you haven't redone the calculation with the new rules.

PostgreSQL internally uses a 2000-01-01 epoch for storing timestamps.

Yeah you gotta watch out for those "Etc" identifiers, especially if you were thinking about exposing all the identifiers to your users wholesale. The file for them has this comment:

> POSIX has positive signs west of Greenwich, but many people expect positive signs east of Greenwich. For example, TZ='Etc/GMT+4' uses the abbreviation "-04" and corresponds to 4 hours behind UT (i.e. west of Greenwich) even though many people would expect it to mean 4 hours ahead of UT (i.e. east of Greenwich).

What happens if a country that's currently at the new UTC-12 anchor wants to move back an hour under that system? Are they forced to "wrap around" and move to the next day instead? Or do you move the anchor itself back (to UTC-13) just to accommodate them?

喷 is included in HSK 5 and Heisig's version of the most common ~3000 characters, it can't be that infrequent.

In addition, the Heisig method doesn't teach "meanings" at all, rather "keywords", which in many cases are only kinda sorta vaguely related to their respective characters' (fragment of) meaning. Either way, they're mainly useful as an "anchor" or name to refer to the character by, and in many cases might as well be arbitrary. The real purpose is just to turn an initially indecipherable blob that is a character into something recognizable (and writable, if you care about that). In general, you're not learning meaning to a useful degree until you start seeing or hearing (when you can associate pronunciation) those characters in context, as you imply. Yeah sure, with Heisig alone you'll be able to see 鸡 and know that it (most likely) refers to chicken, but characters like that are a relatively small proportion.

Keep at it, consistently doing a bit every day, and you'll get there. I went through all the free beginner videos (at the time) before moving onto intermediate, then did the same before moving onto advanced, and only then was I really able to start watching stuff made for native speakers without feeling too lost. I'm not a CI purist though, I looked up words or grammar points occasionally, but I didn't actively try to study or memorize anything.

The first book actually only contains the most common (by their methodology) 1000 characters:

> "The 55 lessons from Book 1 cover the 1,000 most commonly used characters in the Chinese writing system, plus another 500 included either because they are needed to preserve the logical ordering of the material or because they are especially easy to learn at this early stage."

Those 500 are still from the most common ~3000 total that comprise both books at least, but it means that you really have to learn 1500 characters before you're guaranteed to know the most common 1000. And learn all 3000 before you're guaranteed to know the most common 1500.

I've been going so slowly it's taken me years to reach my current point of character #2170, but eventually I'll get there, even if I've already been reading sentences with characters that I haven't gotten to yet for a while now.