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Chrome add-ons to help learn chinese


saenbateman

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One of the problems I have with the add-ons that translate the whole page or random parts of the page is I may not know the words that they have translated. I have been using Ponify to translate the words I know but the problem with that is it keeps the English sentence structure.

 

I was wondering if anyone knew how to translate the grammar structure but keep the words in English? So I can translate the words I know into Chinese

 

Maybe an app that will translate sentences and another app that will translate word by word :/

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I use chrome and I use zhongwen Chinese popup dictionary. I find it very useful for word translation from Chinese to english.

 

I don't know if this is what you wanted. Not sure if you wanted to go from Chinese to english or english to Chinese.

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It sounds like what you want is resources in Chinese-ordered English - we had a little discussion on this years back. The Wikipedia page linked there is now deleted though. Maybe see also this.

 

But probably the easiest way to achieve this is with a piece of Chinese text and a pop-up Chinese to English dictionary?

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I'm sceptical about how useful these "translate random words" add-ons really are for languages as different as English and Chinese. Even if you ignore the differences in sentence structure, how do these add-ons deal with concepts that don't map directly between the two languages (which are countless)? My guess is not well.

 

I'd suggest a better option is changing the language setting of websites where it's an option, and then using Zhongwen/Perapera to mouse-over unfamiliar words. That way, you're getting authentic, idiomatically translated Chinese.

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Assuming the website has been translated properly, which is a big assumption. Plus it's only going to work for boilerplate navigation text, not for the actual content you're probably interested in.

The first point is fair, although I'd hope that most websites which offered multiple language versions had decent translations (after all, no point in offering machine-translated versions as there are many browser plug-ins that perform this function). As for the second, isn't that exactly what the OP wants right now - some simple practice reading Chinese without being overwhelmed by walls of text? I.e.

this is just a transition from English websites to being able to use Chinese websites
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