ChinesePera-Kun VS Hanzibar

Looks like Chinesepera-kun will also work in Thunderbird though.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/3349

Unfortunately it's not compatible with v2 though.

Well I think I still prefer Hanzibar but I'm now using both.

Well, if you haven't done so already, open up Tools->Add-ons and select ChinesePera-kun and then click options. There are a couple of settings there that can be nice to know about. For example you can toggle ChinesePera-kun with a shortcut instead of the context menu or active a small window near the bottom of the screen where you can type in a word and get both translation and character details. This can also be achieved by opening up the options window, clicking the check box "Look up a word" under "Show in context menu". That way, you can select a word, right-click it and select "Lookup Using ChinesePera-kun", which will also give you both translations and hanzi-details at once.

davidhallgren

Nice addition. Do you know of any other tricks like this about these services?

Hi 大家好,

I prefer ChinesePera-kun, because for me it´s way faster to get the translation direkt under the mouse then a wild bunch of words on top of the window that changes on an instant when the mouse moves a millimeter (or even less).

And it has a way better design and it´s faster toggled on

then Hanzibar has loaded the first 13thousand lines after

it has been aktivated.

excuter

Oh cool! Thanks for the davidhallgren. :) Even gives you the number of strokes.

In case someone tries ChinesePera-kun, the feature for getting a larger version of a character as well as more info about a single hanzi can be a little hard to discover. Just press and hold shift while hovering over a character to get more info. For example doing just that on 吗 and 家 gives:

吗 - final interrogative particle

家 - house, home, residence, family

Speaking for Hanzibar (haven't used the other), I use it to look at a larger version of the character. That in itself is very useful to me.

Argh, I sure don't like how paragraph breaks don't appear in these conversation pages.

In my opinion furniture/tool is a bad translation for 家. A better on to me would be.

1. home;house;family

2. a specialist

Makes me want to have a pop-up dictionary that has two functions;first being a longer vertical list, more like a book dictionary, maybe even with an example sentence. The pop up window would have to be bigger, which I do not think would bother me too much. Second, a toggle switch where you could have a Chinese to Chinese definition; example

家-(名)

1. 店舖的數量詞 (例) 一家店舖

2. 稱有成就,有專長的人 (例)專家

etc.

The second would be a good tool to push learners to one;think a bit more in Chinese, two build an understand of a word with a Mandarin favor (lol, like "socialist with Chinese characteristics" Have you heard Cpod lesson with this translation?)

Wonder if a dictionary company would be able to convert their dictionary like this then charge for the online version of it.

Hmm, if I were a business man, maybe trying to patient the idea and take the idea around in hopes of selling it:) Guess that hope is out the window now that I am about to hit the Add Comment button........................

It has the same first entries for 吗 and 家 that hanzibar, morphine and furniture/tool, which obviously aren't the most common meanings.

I think Hanzibar usually gets more translations, but I think that can make it harder sometimes. Is it possible to switch ChinesePera on all the time? At the moment I seem to have to switch it on for every new tab.

Lol, sry about all the typos:( ie. given vs give work vs word work vs would word vs words resent vs recent... ) argh, the more Chinese I learn the worse my English gets:)

Bazza,

Do you like the English translations that ChinesePera-kun uses compared to Hanzibar? From my experience ChinesePera uses maybe the most obscure English words available for translation and does not given a more commonly used English work. For me, I get the meaning, however, I believe my brain work associate commonly used English word to the Chinese much more readily and securely. I have not used Hanzibar's more resent version so I am clueless as to their English translations.

Thanks for chiming in.

Ok, I like ChinesePera-kun, I think I use that on my work's computer. :)

Someone should write a Google Desktop Gadget version that will read any character in any program.

ChinesePera-kun incorporates the Adso dictionary, so it has roughly 140,000 more dictionary entries than Hanzibar. It's also free.

I haven't tried ChinesePera-kun, I'll give it a go.

http://realimaginary.com/HanziBar/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3349

These tools are Chinese pop-up window dictionaries

For those who aren't familiar with those tools, could you provide a brief description and perhaps a link to where they could be found?