Hi HN! In trying to improve my Chinese skills, I built this tool that lets me write a mix of Chinese and English, then recommends a proper Chinese expression. This is super helpful when I want to write something in Chinese but I don't know all the vocab/grammar - I can enter my best effort and use English for the parts I don't know.<p>Really, the fundamental benefit of the tool is that it encourages me to exercise the writing muscle, rather than defaulting to translating from English.<p>My goal was to build something that is fast, relatively inexpensive, and not prone to misleading people. After some experimentation, I found that pairing GPT-3.5 with Microsoft machine translation works great! I'm using GPT-3.5 to generate an English version of the input, then Microsoft machine translation to translate the English version into Chinese. I've written a blog post about how I arrived at this approach: <a href="https://maybecoding.bearblog.dev/my-attempt-at-an-ai-writing-assistant-for-chinese/" rel="nofollow">https://maybecoding.bearblog.dev/my-attempt-at-an-ai-writing...</a><p>The tool is pretty basic from a technical standpoint. There's a PHP backend that handles the API calls to OpenAI and Microsoft. The frontend is plain HTML with a bit of JS for interactivity - but the whole thing works fine without JS.<p>Hopefully other folks find this useful too. I'm interested to know whether I could have approached this problem in a different/better way. Thanks!