Chinese pera-kun plugin or Cpod pinyin tags?

vikram
May 04, 2009, 07:45 PM posted in General Discussion

I've noticed a few times that the pinyin support on my pera-kun plugin enabled firefox shows tones different from the pinyin tone tags provided on the cpod vocab,expansion and dialogue pages.

Gets a little confusing when i move the mouse over a character and notice that the pera-kun plugin shows 4th tone for some character and when i disable it to verify the tone using the cpod pinyin tag , the tag says its a 2nd tone. 

Is the pera-kun plugin for firefox faulty? Noticed a lot of wrong tones often

Profile picture
lisa_t
May 04, 2009, 08:26 PM

I have noticed it to that there are somtimes mistakes in the pera-kun plugin.

I use another tool that is called pinyin dictionary. It's an offline tool that converts characters into pinyin. It has somtimes mistakes, too.

Somtimes I use http://www.chinese-tools.com/tools/pinyin.html for converting characters to pinyin, which outputs different options for some characters.

For example 了 returns: liǎo / le.

It seems that sometimes it is not so easy to find the correct pinyin for a given character.

 

Profile picture
jckeith
May 04, 2009, 08:41 PM

Many characters have more than one pronunciation and meaning, and Perakun only picks one for each character. For example, 说 can be pronounced either shuō or shuì and Perakun picks shuì.

Profile picture
changye
May 04, 2009, 11:43 PM

Chinese pera-kun is very useful, but I don't recommend newbies and ellies to heavily depend on the plugin because it often shows wrong tones especially for multi-reading characters (多音字) as jckeith pointed out above. To make matters worse, there are much more 多音字 in Chinese than you might think, and important characters are often 多音字. Please try to mouse over 石 (shi2, stone). Thanks (?) to Chinese pera-kun, you will find that 石 is also a 多音字, which is pronounced as "dan4".