Color-coding Chinese characters by tone

[yakeyglee]

Hey guys. I'm interested in finding some sort of application that can take in some Chinese text and output that text with the characters colored in a way that corresponds to the tones of the characters as they are used in the sentence. Tones are usually the hardest thing for me to remember in the pronunciation of a character, so I figure if I learn them through a visual cue like color, it'll be easier for me to recall the tone. The idea of it is somewhat like this book, but that's only for 100 commonly used characters -- I'd ideally like to be able to do this for any characters that I choose.

For instance, something that would automatically convert the sentence 你的连衣裙太大了 into 你的连衣裙太大了.

I'd be okay even with something simple like a web app that would take copy-and-pasted text and convert it into a colored version like above, or perhaps even some sort of a browser extension that, with the click of a button, could convert the Chinese text on the current webpage into the colored version.

Does anyone know of anything that exists comparable to what I'm describing? Thanks!

[renzhe]

http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=translate

It will split your text into words, and colour code each one. Does that help?

[Ludens]

The Pinyin Toolkit plugin of Anki also offers this. I don't really see the advantage however, one needs to be able to read without this kind of color-coding eventually, why not learn it right away?

[yakeyglee]

The Pinyin Toolkit plugin of Anki also offers this. I don't really see the advantage however, one needs to be able to read without this kind of color-coding eventually, why not learn it right away?

Because, Ludens, it's simply an aid to learning. Why learn pinyin when you have to learn to dictate text without it anyway?

http://www.mdbg.net/...?page=translate

It will split your text into words, and colour code each one. Does that help?

renzhe, that is actually somewhat helpful. Not 100% what I'm looking for, but better than nothing so far. Thanks!

[renzhe]

What you're looking for might not exist.

The problem is that many Chinese characters have multiple pronunciations, and this often entails different tones and different meanings. Also, the tone of some characters changes depending on the phrase they are in (一 and 不), and many characters adopt neutral tone in some words, but not in others.

In your example, 的 can be read de or dí or dì. 大 can be dà or dài, and 了 can be le or liǎo.

So any program that can automatically colour complete sentences (like in your example) will have to basically understand the sentence -- know the word delineation and the grammatical role each character plays in the sentence. This is very difficult and error-prone. These are the same problems which make reading texts outloud so difficult -- if people have trouble parsing sentences after many years of training, then it will be difficult for a computer too.

The best bet might be to get some online tool that gives you pinyin, and then convert the tone information from that into character colours using some sort of custom program.

[Ludens]

Why learn pinyin when you have to learn to dictate text without it anyway?

Because I would guess it's much harder to learn to dictate text without learning pinyin then to learn tones without colours. Anyway, I wasn't trying to offend anyone, sorry if you do feel offended somehow.

[Iriya]

I find color coded tones really useful in dictionary applications, since I don't have to squint my eyes to make sure I got the tiny tone marks right (another reason why I prefer tone numbers over tone marks). But it's not really applicable in text, at least without an extensive dictionary and some sentence structure analysis. E.g. 便 can be read both bian4 and pian2 depending on the word, 重 can be read both zhong4 and chong2. And then there's tone sandhi and tone neutralization which were already mentioned. Just use a pop up dictionary for the words you're not sure about, no need for such a drastic solution.

[imron]

Why learn pinyin when you have to learn to dictate text without it anyway?

Personally I don't think you should learn the pinyin for each character either - instead you should use pinyin to find out the sound, and then remember the sound. If you need to know the pinyin, you can then recreate it from the sound, rather than always trying to create the sound from the pinyin.

The difference between these two approaches can be quite subtle, but I've found the latter to be a more effective means of learning, especially when you are trying to reproduce the words yourself in general usage.

[ParkeNYU]

I use the Perapera-kun dictionary plugin with modified tone colours, and I love it. Since the Google Chrome version does not yet offer the option to define custom tone-colour assignments, I went into the code and changed the colours myself.

 

I like this Mandarin/Cantonese set for its mnemonic and synesthetic values (the neutral tone may be black, white, or any shade of grey in between):