News in Chinese

Wow, this is cool! Thanks for sharing this. Pretty amazing that you can click and save to your CPod vocab. manager. It doesn't look like it's possible on the site, but is there anyway to view this in traditional characters? Thanks trevelyan.

Just put an interface to the backend annotator on the NIC site. Put it up so I can add words to my Vocab Manager from arbitrary texts. Might be useful for you guys too: http://newsinchinese.com/node/1648 As before, you need to be logged in and have your preferences set appropriately for the click-to-add functionality to work with ChinesePod.

Dave - how do you get a username and password?

@calkins - used to have a way to make it display fanti, but am not sure how implementing it would affect the new popups (editing). Will implement something that can "switch" the display to traditional - need to think through how to handle the in-popup editing for that though. @RJBerki - the site uses the same remote-authentication system as the dictionary. Just login as you would there.. @henning - my new word of the day is 弹弓 (sling), from a television interview this morning. Funny how it's the strangest words that stick with you.

Thanks Dave. I really like the pop-up annotator used on this site - much faster than ChinesePera-kun, and doesn't get "stuck".

Wow, this is amazing! My only issue is that so far I've only learned traditional characters - any chance of getting a news feed like this out of Taiwan?

Very cool and useful. Think an arts and entertainment category is necessary and a category for culture or 'life in China' for stories such as http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/JB27Ad01.html on Chinese traditional holidays becoming official work holidays or http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-11/03/content_7003406.htm on the Olympic baby phenomenon

@jenyoung - just re-enabled traditional support. No need for a plugin (the site will handle the conversion), but you need to set your account preferences here: http://64.13.254.215/node/302 add-to-vocab functionality should still work with traditional characters. Edits/additions are logged, but don't go into the Adso engine live. @sushan - Xinhua entertainment feed is now being annotated too.

What a great resource! Proper nouns to the nth degree, but as you say, for learning how to scan/ parse, this has brilliant potential. Thanks for pointing the way and, er, also working on it? I'm not clear on how or if this project is affiliated with ChinesePod. Stepping back a bit: ChinesePod desperately, desperately needs a page of "Look here for... ... reading news in Chinese ... getting traditional characters on your display ... how to type in Chinese on XP, Vista, Mac... ... how to type pinyin ... what the heck 88groups are. And Labs. ... other Chinese dictionaries ... sites that can give you pinyin from Chinese characters ... twitter or flicker or twitcher or twitster or whatever the heck it's called ... and so on." Whether it's a wiki or a FAQ or just a bunch of links or whatever, it's so necessary (and if it already exists and I don't know about it, it needs to be more clearly marked!). Because in 100 hours this thread will be buried and no one who comes to the site will ever discover the news resource. Because the Firefox traditional plugin was talked about long ago and now is only occasionally mentioned, and many people don't even know it exists. Yeah, I know there's a forum but... this information should be on ChinesePod itself.

This looks really great! I like reading, reading and more reading.... Just one question. What is Xinhua?

I have so far worked with Goulnik's 88news: http://www.88groups.com/88news it really boosted my reading comprehension - especially because of the variety of selected topics which ranges from motorcylicng frogs to reports on the development of HD standards.

== New China official news agency...

Dave, much thanks for the traditional support. That was fast!

Wow - this is a really great website! I don't think my Chinese is good enough yet to make proper use of it, but it'll be great when it is. Thanks trevelyan - very useful.

Thanks Goulniky! One more bookmark for the collection.

Dave, CNPC seems to be the longest word in Adsotrans. See last news: http://64.13.254.215/node/359

this is kind of a stupid question - how does one get a user name and pass word for NewsInChinese? I can't find a sign up link anywhere

this is definitely a great tool and will benefit many. Thanks for bringing this to our attention

@lostinasia - NIC is part of the Adso project, but ChinesePod is sponsoring server costs. We use the engine for some lesson preparation work here so it's win-win. The software/dictionary is available for download as well: http://adsotrans.com/downloads/ @jenyoung - just use your ChinesePod login. The site pings CPod to confirm your account and logs you in that way. Message me if you try this and still have problems. @bazza - I think the longest word in the system is actually an old Qing dynasty term for Bangkok which clocks in at over 40 characters (!insane!). The NLP engine running the site tries to figure out what words "go together" and groups proper nouns to the extent it understands them. Bad pos-of-speech tagging can cause it to bundle units incorrectly, although the nonsensical english definition is usually a give-away in these cases. The good thing is that being aggressively optimistic about bundling words together makes backend pos-tagging errors more visible and more likely to be corrected. Also, if the system gets a word wrong but someone corrects it using the click-to-edit functionality, the corrected version gets added to the database and that solves the problem from another angle.

xinhua = 新华社 (Xīnhuáshè) Xinhua News Agency