Posts with Characters...Request for Pinyin

Hmmm, sorry...the tags didn't work. I'll try again. Lately it seems that a lot of posts have been in characters only, without any pinyin or translation. I'm wondering if people wouldn't mind including pinyin and/or translating the characters. I've only been studying characters for about a month, so I barely know a hundred. I think pinyin would be very helpful to newbies like me. I normally copy and paste the characters into xuezhongwen.net for translation, but it becomes a pain to do constantly. I know it's probably a pain for everyone to provide characters AND pinyin, but I also think it's a good reinforcement for the poster and everyone else. Thanks! Brent

Agreed, at Elementary level it should be automatic in lesson discussions. Maybe not in Intermediate, though. Remembering that each Newbie lesson is designed to be used as a person's first (or second or third) lesson ever, there is hardly any reason to use Chinese in any form beyond what that lesson involves (or very naturally extends to), unless you are willing to isolate newcomers from the community that they find within their own lesson space.

Hi Brent, If you use Firefox, as recommended by a member here (I can't remember who) on one of the dialog discussions, there is a free add-on called ChinesePera-kun which will allow you to avoid the annoying cut and paste ... just point at the characters of interest and a box automatically pops up with the pinyin and translation ... very cool indeed. I use it all the time. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3349 再見， 何睿林

I agree with AuntySue. I make it a point to spell out my characters in Newbie and Elementary lessons, and sometimes in general user discussions. I generally don't mess with it in the Intermediate lessons.

Wow heruilin, that is cool! I'm a Safari user, but I think this little tool may bring to the Firefox side. Thanks for this great tip.

There is also Hanzibar which works a lot faster, I find ChinesePera-kun very sluggish. http://realimaginary.com/HanziBar/ I'm trying to wean myself off pinyin.

sluggish? I guess it depends on your bandwidth, but it seems to me after you've activated it on one window, and provided you keep your browser open, it's reasonably fast. Unless you want to translate every single word that is...

one thing none of these tool can do though is adapt to the context, what they do is provide all definitions in their database, Hanzibar probably even more so. What you would really need is a tool that only gives you the relevant definition. That's what I'm trying to do with my annoted 88newsgroup.