How to figure out if a Character is used as a word

[陆咔思]

This Joyce-discussion keeps reminding me of the Joyce or Chinglish-Test (http://www.thatsmags...blog/view/13211) ;).

Even if it got that right however, it still then borks on the example sentence in my dictionary for '到了' '这件事，到了他也没说清楚'.

Which should be: 'Zhè jiàn shì, dàoliǎo tā yě méi shuō qīngchu', but which Google renders as: 'Zhè jiàn shì, dàole tā yě méi shuō qīngchu'

Actually the segmentation here is fine - it recognized 到了 as a word. But then finding out if 到了 is dao4le5 or dao4liao3 is a whole new different issue, one that may be even more difficult. I wonder how one could solve this, I guess you'd have to do some kind of grammatical analysis? Though even that would only work if the two pronunciations have different grammatical functions. Fortunately it's not such a common issue, most of the time you'd be fine choosing the more common version.