Pinyiner for Android

[@nt]

For all Android phone/tablet owners, this will probably be the most useful app for learning Chinese: Pinyiner !

 

Living in China, I always need to read messages in Chinese from friends, group chats, web pages. I don't know many characters, only Pinyin, plus need to look up some words. I couldn't find an app that would do the fast annotation, so I created Pinyiner. It annotates Chinese really fast and shows the meaning of a word if you click on it, all this fully offline. 

 

I also had a problem that simply speaking Chinese occasionally didn't expand my vocabulary much, so I thought a good way would be to read some stories or even books in Chinese. But it's hard without knowing the characters. So Pinyiner also has a feature of annotating a whole file; you can copy a Chinese book as a .txt file on your phone and read it in Pinyin at any time. One interesting story is actually included, so that you can see how it works.

 

When I started learning Chinese, I used Anki flashcards a lot, it's a great way to memorize new words. That's why in Pinyiner, you can mark new words and export them directly to AnkiDroid or Anki Desktop for later review.

 

The app can also convert between Simplified/Traditional systems. Plus, those who want to practice reading without Pinyin can hide the annotation.

 

I share the app for free and really hope it will make the communication a little bit better in our world

Looking forward to your feedback and requests of new features!

 

Pinyiner on Google Play

 

Anton

[Shelley]

Hello and welcome to the forums.

 

Good looking app, thank you for sharing.

 

This looks like it could be really useful.

 

Can you only export to Ankidroid or can you export them to other flashcard apps?

[@nt]

Hello Shelley! It currently only supports Anki, because I find Anki simple, it's free, actively developed and works on many platforms. 

But what is your favorite flashcards app?

[imron]

Pleco is the usual favourite for Chinese learners.  The import format is just tab separated fields.

[Shelley]

I use Pleco. As imron says it is very popular with Chinese learners.

 

IMHO I found Anki too inconsistent and fussy for learning Chinese. Pleco is much more user friendly.

[@nt]

Ok I will include the tab-separated export in the next release. It may also be useful for other purposes.

[Shelley]

Ok let us know when the next release comes out and i will try it.

 

Thanks for taking the change on board.

[@nt]

But have you tried annotating Chinese text with Pinyiner? If you have some suggestions, I can incorporate them too.

[@nt]

Please try the new version of the Pinyiner annotator, it has the Pleco export and a cool new feature - Clipboard monitor: whenever a Chinese text is copied somewhere, it's automatically annotated in the notification area (hint: you can pinch-zoom in/out the notification to change the view mode) - of course you can also disable it in the Settings

[Shelley]

Thanks for letting us know, will go and have a look later.