Pinyinput - Type Pinyin with Tone Marks

[imron]

Pinyinput is now available for iOS!

 

You can find out more from the Pinyinput website: https://www.pinyinput.net/ios/

 

or download it directly from the AppStore here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pinyinput/id1303780575?ls=1&mt=8

[Pall]

I installed the program, but it didn't work. I'd chosen Australian English location, but as tried to type pinyin Cyryllic letters were typed. It was pure installation to a new notebook. Maybe it's because the language in my Windows is cyryllic?

[imron]

That's curious.  The program only outputs Unicode.

 

What version of Windows are you running?

[Pall]

It's Windows 10. Could you tell me, please, how to reply with quotation?

[Shelley]

Highlight the text you want to quote and a box appears with the words Quote Selection, click the box and the text will appear at your curser in your post.

 

6 hours ago, Pall said:

Could you tell me, please, how to reply with quotation?

 

[Pall]

55 minutes ago, Shelley said:

Highlight the text you want to quote

Thank you!

[imron]

Ok, I think I know the problem.

 

Pinyinput detects the default keyboard layout, and uses that as the initial base layout for keys.  This is so that people who don't use a qwerty keyboard will have all the keys in their expected places e.g. French and German speakers who typically use `azerty` and `qwertz` layouts will have the `a` and `z` keys in the expected places when typing pinyin.

 

What's happened with you is that you will have a Cyrillic keyboard as your default keyboard layout and so Pinyinput has used that as the base layout instead of a keyboard with the latin alphabet and because the base keyboard is Cyrillic it just outputs the Cyrillic keys that were pressed.

 

This is easy to fix because you can change the keyboard layout Pinyinput uses in the settings.  On the Pinyinput toolbar, click the blue 'gears' button, which will open the Pinyinput configuration dialog, and from there set the 'Keyboard Layout' to one that uses the latin alphabet such as US keyboard.

 

If you have any problems, let me know and I'll put together screenshots showing all the steps.

[Pall]

@imron Hi, it works very well, thank you very much!
But I decided to use mupin instead of pinyin. It's Russian cyrilic based Mandarin transcription, which matches Chinese sounds more precisely. Unfortunately, there are no cyrillic letters with all symbols used as tone indications at all and I have to use numbers. By the way, could you make an alteration of your program to run mupin instead of pinyin. I could invest US$1,000 in the development.

[imron]

7 hours ago, Pall said:

But I decided to use mupin instead of pinyin. It's Russian cyrilic based Mandarin transcription, which matches Chinese sounds more precisely.

Do you have any information about this transcription method?  A quick search for 'mupin' didn't show up anything (I guess the source material is all in russian?)

[Pall]

On 7/9/2019 at 4:10 AM, imron said:

Do you have any information about this transcription method? 

There is a short article in the Russian Wikipedia, but it says only that the method was developed by a group of Chinese, Kyrgyz and Russians in 2011, and it's called by the name of the leader, 穆平. His name is Mu Ping according to pinyin, but I translitterated the Russian version of his name and the method name, that's why it's Mupin in English.  The Wikipedia's article doesn't include information on it's correspondence with pinyin. I can uploud the table here. 

[Pall]

By the way, I rewrote a short Chinese dialogue in Mupin and asked two friends of mine, who had never learnt Mandarin or another versions of Chinese, to read it aloud just as if it was a Russian text and make an audio record. It's an experiment. As soon as they send me the files I'll upload the audio to show how it sounds. Maybe it's interesting to you and other forum participants.

[imron]

12 hours ago, Pall said:

The Wikipedia's article doesn't include information on it's correspondence with pinyin. I can uploud the table here. 

That would be useful.  I can't make any commitments yet, but seeing the mappings will give me an idea of how much work is involved.

[Pall]

@imron

I compiled the audio. Please, listen to how a girl is reading Mandarin text for the first time in her life. I'd like to know your opinion. The text is written in Mupin. I'm still looking for the table.

Mupin.mp3

[Pall]

@imron Here is the table of correspondence between Mupin and Pinyin, please. 
 

Sorry, I have deleted it, since it's necessary to improve its in presentation. If anybody is interested, please, let me know.

 

 

 

 

[Pall]

I'm also asking all here, who have listened to the audio, to express your opinion on the potential of the Mupin transcription method, please. Could you understand what she was saying? Or maybe you didn't understand even my speaking?

[Pall]

Since no one wrote anything on that, I don't know what to think. Just in case I'm uploading the text of the dialogue in Mupin, and below you'll find it in Pinyin. If you know some Russian-speaker, you can ask him to read the text and you'll see how it sounds. 
Because the mupin version is without tones in order not to disorient those, who are not familiar with that, but tone marks above the words also show the main vowel in diphthongs, I just marked the main vowels in bold. You should tell this to the person, whom you'll be asking to read it.

 

 

[imron]

14 hours ago, Pall said:

I don't know what to think.

I wouldn't think too much about it.  You're posting about a niche sub-area of a niche topic and there was only 1 hour or so between your two posts.  That's not a lot of time for people interested in the niche of the niche to post a reply.

 

I listened to the audio.  I think the results are probably on a par with if you got a native English speaker to read from the pinyin, though probably better than if you got a native Russian speaker to read from the pinyin.

 

I could mostly understand you, but there were some parts that were incomprehensible.  The female speaker I could also understand large parts (though perhaps because I had just listened to your recording), but her reading was not as easy to understand as yours and there were also many incomprehensible parts, though interestingly some things I thought she pronounced better than you (电影，电影院) - though perhaps just because she was speaking more slowly.

[Publius]

I listened to the audio. Interesting how Helen consistently pronounced 'wo' as 'you'. Once I figured that out, the rest was pretty easy, though apparently Russian lacks the /ŋ/ sound and /y/ sound.

喂，是小兰吗？

你是谁呀？

我是江山，你听不出来？

你在哪儿打电话？

晚上有电影，你忘了？

没忘，我有点儿事耽误了。

你有什么重要事？

我五点半下班，差十分六点到了地铁站。

怎么还不回家？

我忘了带电影票，要回去找。

你真马虎。

六点一刻回地铁站，又走（？）了站。

噢，我的天，现在赶快，电影七点开始，我在电影院门口等你。

你看看现在是几点钟了？

现在是七点过十分了。

那你别来了，我回家吧。

[Pall]

6 hours ago, imron said:

I think the results are probably on a par with if you got a native English speaker to read from the pinyin, though probably better than if you got a native Russian speaker to read from the pinyin.

Thank you for your evaluation! However, I don't think that an English-speaker would pronounce sonds like "z", "c", "q", "j", "zh" to be understandable without preliminary learning how to do that, whereas the Russian female had no idea how it should be pronounce, she was just reading it as if in Russian.

[Pall]

8 hours ago, Publius said:

I listened to the audio. Interesting how Helen consistently pronounced 'wo' as 'you'. Once I figured that out, the rest was pretty easy, though apparently Russian lacks the /ŋ/ sound and /y/ sound.

True, the  /ŋ/ sound doesn't exist in Russian in fact. But its the only serious missing in the mupin in respect of pronouncing without preliminary learning how to do that. One, who is going to read something in mupin, should be warned in advance about that, and he would be able to pronounce /ŋ/ in proper places without much difficulty. As to other two missings, /you/ instead of /wo/ and lacking /y/, they happened just because of her inattention. She was at the Cote d'Azur beach while recording it to her phone. But I wanted to undertake the experiment neatly, so I didn't give her any instructions (besides those about bold letters). I also noticed the use of /you/ instead of /wo/ at once. It would have been helpful if the other participant had sent me his recording, but he had got a sore throut. But it was also a female voice, I should, probably, ask a man to make a recoring.