New Chinese Learning Tool: Hanzi Data

[Ruben von Zwack]

I had no idea it was incorrect to type a tone sandhi out in Pinyin, but I'm glad it is ;) I have seen it here and there, and always found it totally confusing. Always made me go back and check my dictionary.

[imron]

I had no idea it was incorrect to type a tone sandhi out in Pinyin, but I'm glad it is

I think the creators of Pinyin correctly figured that it would be too confusing and introduce ambiguity to indicate this, and so decided that it made more sense to put the impetus on people using pinyin to know about tone sandhi and apply it as necessary when reading out loud.

[GaoJinJie]

Just a note, I've made some major updates to the tool and it seems much, much more accurate now! Thanks everybody for the advice, and keep it coming!

[Manuel]

Observing tone sandhi may be incorrect according to official pinyin rules, but you are of course free to observe it if you find it useful. I do. In Anki, when a 3rd tone becomes a 2nd tone, I transcribe it as a 2nd tone directly, and I use a different font color for the mutated syllable. However, last month I stopped bothering with the colors completely, because in spoken Chinese nobody flashes a color card every time tone sandhi occurs--the context always makes it clear enough.

In addition, different speakers in different contexts may use different tone sandhi e.g. depending on what they want to stress, so a computer would not be 100% accurate, therefore it's best to leave it out completely.

[GaoJinJie]

Note: I have made a new thread for this post because of the substantial changes to Hanzi Data.

www.hanzidata.com

It is my pleasure to introduce the new Hanzi Data. For those who don't know about this resource, it includes:

• A Chinese translation dictionary now for multi-character words
  
• Frequency information for Chinese words and phrases
  
• Character deconstruction
  

Also, we have improved the Character Intonation Tool. This tool automatically places tone marks above characters, which you can then toggle on and off to practice speaking Chinese phrases with proper tones.

You can now also save/favourite your important words or intonations, so you can access them easily later. We are also looking to include some more statistics for Chinese phrases soon.

I would love to get some feedback on how people find the tools, are they useful, accurate, easy, etc?

Thanks,

Dan

[WestTexas]

The box to search in is kind of confusing. It took me a few minutes to find. Maybe u could make it look more like other search boxes instead of so... big?

Is the frequency listed for the words relative to other words for that character, or is it absolute? It seems odd that 肇庆 (a city in Guangdong province, and probably not extremely common) has the same size frequency bar as 我.

Your site lists 低调 as the most common word containing the 调 character. This can't be right. I checked two other frequency lists and both of them have 10+ other words with 调 as being more common than 低调.

[imron]

Note: I have made a new thread for this post because of the substantial changes to Hanzi Data.

Note: I have merged it with the other thread, because when someone is promoting a tool that they have developed, we generally like to keep discussion in a single thread rather than split over multiple ones. It makes it easier for people to search and find.

[Sobria-Ebritas]

dansemacabre: imho, what you are doing is really impressing and useful. I like the frequency bit in particular.

I´d just like to point out that the analysis of 爵 gives the following components:

• 爫

• 罒

• 寸

It seems there´s a component missing, namely (u+efd0).

Something similar happens when analysing 既:

• 艮

• 旡

Shouldn´t it be (u+efd0) instead of 艮?

[alanmd]

I have made a similar tool, which is a lot uglier (maybe we should combine our efforts!) but is lighting fast:: http://hskhsk.pythonanywhere.com/cidian?q=可能 - you can switch on full definitions for each character/word with a link at the top, and can click on characters and words. I'm still working on it off and on, so feel free to suggest things that I should add. Cheers!