really dumb Word question

[totalnovice]

hi,

I'm trying to learn a little Chinese, and I've been using Word. it's helpful for making flashcards, etc.

But I can't figure out how to get the pinyin for a character once the character is in Word. If I enter a character in pinyin, it works fine... but if I later forget the pinyin, I don't have any way to figure it out!

or, if I paste Chinese text from somewhere else, it appears just fine. If I right-click on a character and choose "translate" I can even get a dictionary definition. but it does not tell me the pinyin anywhere. This is a little annoying, because knowing the pinyin is very helpful both for pronunciation and for looking characters up in the dictionary.

is there some simple thing I'm missing? all I want to do is be able to click on a character and find out the pinyin for it.

thanks!

[muyongshi]

I think you need to just write it out underneath the character or something. I don't think there is a way that you can click and see it but I could be wrong (as I usually am...)

[imron]

I don't think this is really possible in Word. If you were dead set on using Word, then the thing to do would be to write the pinyin next to character. You could optionally set the text colour to white, so it would be hidden until you highlighted it.

For typing pinyin with tones, see here.

For text from webpages, you might also consider using Firefox and the Chinesepera-kun plugin.

You could also consider tools such as HanConv for converting sections of Chinese text.

For flashcards, you might consider a spaced-repetition system like Anki.

[roddy]

It is possible in Word, but it's a bit non-user friendly. You may well be better off with the tools mentioned above.

[totalnovice]

thanks for the replies!

I'm mostly using books; just using Word because it was there an easy to start writing flash cards.

The tip about using the Word "format / asian language / phonetic guide" feature was helpful. When I'm using a PRC IME, it gives me pinyin back, which is just what I wanted. But when I use it on characters generated with the Taiwanese IME, the "Ruby text" box gives me Chinese alphabetic characters (bopomofo). Even if I've entered a character with pinyin in the Chinese (Taiwan) IME, it will only give me back the bopomofo. That's funny, since Word certainly knows what the pinyin is for that character (that's how I entered it). So "phonetic guide" is sort of useful.

For Firefox, Chinesepera-kun is fantastic. A really great tool. I'm sure it will really help me read.

thanks again.

[imron]

But when I use it on characters generated with the Taiwanese IME, the "Ruby text" box gives me Chinese alphabetic characters (bopomofo).

Keep reading that same thread, and a little further down, there's the solution to this problem.