ChinesePera-Kun VS Hanzibar

man2toe
May 17, 2007, 09:31 PM posted in General Discussion
ChinesePera-kun and hanzibar are both very good and rather necessary tools for Chinese learning. Please tell us the reasons one is better than the other for you.
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Kyle
May 18, 2007, 01:26 AM

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?

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bazza
June 05, 2007, 10:51 AM

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.

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bazza
May 18, 2007, 06:02 AM

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

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trevelyan
May 18, 2007, 09:16 AM

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

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bazza
May 18, 2007, 10:02 AM

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

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bazza
May 18, 2007, 10:13 AM

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

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man2toe
May 18, 2007, 07:30 PM

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.

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man2toe
May 18, 2007, 07:33 PM

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:)

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bazza
May 18, 2007, 07:42 PM

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.

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bazza
May 18, 2007, 11:46 PM

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

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man2toe
May 18, 2007, 05:41 AM

http://realimaginary.com/HanziBar/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3349 These tools are Chinese pop-up window dictionaries

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man2toe
May 19, 2007, 01:24 AM

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

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f1b1
May 19, 2007, 02:20 AM

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.

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davidhallgren
May 19, 2007, 06:54 AM

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

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bazza
May 19, 2007, 11:03 AM

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

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excuter
May 19, 2007, 01:15 PM

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

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man2toe
May 19, 2007, 03:18 PM

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

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davidhallgren
May 20, 2007, 06:29 AM

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.

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bazza
June 04, 2007, 08:41 AM

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

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man2toe
May 19, 2007, 01:23 AM

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........................