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How I Built Greek Alphabet Cards That Look Like Letters

Hacker News •
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A developer living in China created a clever set of Greek alphabet cards for his kids, where each illustration is drawn to visually resemble the letter it represents. His three-and-a-half-year-old children are learning Greek alongside Chinese and another language, so he wanted something more effective than rote memorization.

He took a data-driven approach, downloading GreekLex—a corpus of 35,304 Modern Greek words—and filtering for common words between 3-10 characters. He fed candidates to ChatGPT in batches, asking which objects could be drawn to echo letter shapes. The shortlist went to OpenAI's gpt-image-1.5 model for generation, with the Greek letter provided as a reference image to guide the output.

The cards work. His kids learned about 18 letters in two half-hour sessions. He created games including a "fire game" where kids name letters to move him away from pretend flames. While similar English products exist, he believes these are the first such cards for Greek.

Key entities: {

"companies": ["OpenAI"],

"people": [],

"locations": ["China"]

}