Show HN: HanView -Effortless Learning Chinese on Wallpapers (github.com)

HanView is a lightweight Windows utility that turns your desktop into a passive Chinese-learning surface by fetching Bing’s daily wallpaper, overlaying a frequently used Chinese word, and setting the finished image as your wallpaper every three hours. It’s a sister project to Binglish and targets the top 10,000 Chinese words, offering features like one-click dictionary lookup, AI-generated spoken explanations, random review of past wallpapers, and easy save/copy of images. The app minimizes to the system tray, can auto-run at startup, and ships as a packaged EXE (or can be run via python hanview.py, though that disables the “Check for Updates” feature). For AI/ML readers this is interesting as a small, practical example of ambient learning: combining automated content selection (Bing wallpapers), curated vocabulary lists, and generative audio/explanations to create repeated, low-friction exposures that can aid retention. Technical notes and caveats: it’s tailored to Windows 10+ at 1920×1080 (other resolutions are untested), depends on tkinter for the GUI, and uses generative AI for explanations which may be inaccurate. Setup involves cloning the repo, installing requirements, and optionally bundling with pyinstaller. Privacy, correctness of AI explanations, and UX for non-standard resolutions are the main considerations for adoption and future improvement.