Ask for suggestions on a free Chinese reading software

[yifeng]

I am very glad that you found Smart Chinese Reader of some use. Thank you very much for your comments. Yes, SmartCR's basic features are similar to Chinese Toolbox or DimSum because these features are musts of a reader. But some other features make it unique. Besides part of speech tagging, TTS (text to speech) is an advanced feature of Smart Chinese Reader. Try to follow pronunciation of sentences to familiarize yourself with the rhythm of Chinese. I believe rhythm is critical to master a language. Another advanced feature of SmartCR is phrased-based machine translation, which I have studied for five years, but unfortunately it turns out that users are little interested in this feature. It is a risk of R&D, is it? Anyway, I want to push the project. The new feature in the next version will be example sentence search, double-clicking a word to find related Chinese-English sentence pairs. Your suggestions on statistics are quite helpful, I have added them to my to-do list. 

[xiaokaka]

I think it looks like a very interesting program! Unfortunately, I don't have windows installed on my Mac anymore (small SSD hard drive so not much space, and I didn't need Windows anymore), so I can't try it out.

You don't have any plans for a Mac version, do you?

[yifeng]

I am happy that you are interested in my program. Sorry, I have no immediate plans for a Mac version, because I still have some interesting ideas to realize in the Windows version, it may take one or two years. And the current features need to be perfected.

[tiantian]

How about a wordlist feature where you can manage wordlists of known and unknown words and then display on screen which words are new to you in the text, like in Chinese Toolbox. With click on the word you can "learn" and "unlearn" a word. Together with the enhanced word segmentation, this would definately a big bonus for your tool.

 

And you should not forget that this is meant to be a READER, so perhaps for the "Advanced view" options like font, font size and to disable the yellow arrow behind each sentence should be possible.

[yifeng]

You provided useful information for me to improve Smart Chinese Reader. Thanks! Now I know learners place importance on known/unknown word lists. I will add the feature in the future versions. One problem is that in the current version, click on a word displays the popup dictionary, and right-click displays the context menu. In the next version, double-click on a word will display example sentences. So I must find a new mouse or keyboard operation for users to toggle between known and unknown.

 

In the next version, I will allow users to choose font and font size in the "advanced view". Could you please explain the reason to "disable the yellow arrow behind each sentence"? It is used to navigate to the same sentence in the “basic view”. Does it disturb reading?

[tiantian]

Yes, I found the arrows to be a little distracting. But this is just me, because I would rarely use the "Basic view" anyways.

 

For me, computer-generated translation of the sentences is not important. What I like most about your programm is the accurate word segmentation. Did you use the Stanford Chinese Word Segmenter (http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/segmenter.shtml#Download) for it? I like how it is more accurate than other segmenters out there. Thats why it is good for word and vocabulary extraction.

 

A simple UI button where you can switch the arrows on and off might do the trick, but it is not that important, you should prioritize other features and of course always try to enhance the segmenter.

 

Oh, by the way, shouldn´t it be the other way round? To me, the "Advanced view" is the "Basic view" and the "Basic view" is the "Advanced view", since it shows much more information than the other one. I would switch the names.

[yifeng]

I didn't use the Stanford Chinese Word Segmenter, which is based on CRF. In my program, a sentence is first split by a HMM-based segmenter. Then, the result is adjusted by a set of rules. It is a hybrid system. I think besides choosing a proper model, the segmentation accuracy is largely determined by parameters and rules. They come from a lot of experiments. 

 

The basic view in Smart Chinese Reader is designed for beginning students with "basic" Chinese skills, and the advanced view for students with "advanced" Chinese skills. To make their purposes more clear, I am considering the following name pairs: beginner/advanced, verbose/terse, elaborate/normal. What do you think?

[tiantian]

 

The basic view in Smart Chinese Reader is designed for beginning students with "basic" Chinese skills, and the advanced view for students with "advanced" Chinese skills. To make their purposes more clear, I am considering the following name pairs: beginner/advanced, verbose/terse, elaborate/normal. What do you think?

 

In this case, "Beginner / Advanced" would be more clear.

[yifeng]

Smart Chinese Reader 1.9 is now released with two major features added:

 

1. Example sentence lookup

 

Double-clicking on a word either in the Beginner tab or in the Advanced tab will bring up the Examples tab in which example sentences containing the current word are provided. Example sentences give you a sense of how the word is used. Each example sentence is a Chinese-English sentence pair, in which the Chinese sentence is original and the English sentence is its translation by human translator. Because sentences were originally conceived in Chinese, it ensures the authenticity of Chinese word usages.

 

 

2. Changeable font sizes

 

The font sizes of the Beginner tab, the Advanced tab, and the Examples tab can be adjusted by the user. If you find Chinese or English characters are too small to read, you can enlarge them to 125%, 150% ... to make the text clearer. This is helpful for people with bad eyesight. 

 

 

You can download Smart Chinese Reader 1.9 from http://www.nlptool.com/index.html. Please try it out and give us some feedback. 

[twinmatrix]

Thank you for the program!

 

I need advice regarding Windows 10. I installed the Chinese speech pack, per instructions on your website, but don't see anything similar. I just see:

 

Microsoft David Desktop -- this one just speaks English..

Microsoft Hanhan Desktop -- it says "(Taiwan)", so probably a wrong accent?

Microsoft Simplified Chinese -- sounds absolutely horrible

Microsoft Zira Desktop -- just speaks English

 

Which one should I choose? Or did it not install properly?

[yifeng]

I am very glad to hear your feedback. Since "Microsoft Hanhan" voice which is based on a native speaker from Taibei has been installed on your computer, it seems that you have selected the language pack "中文(繁體) - Chinese Traditional (Taiwan)". If this was the problem, please reinstall "中文(简体) - Chinese Simplified". 

 

If you have installed "中文(简体) - Chinese Simplified" indeed. There is also a very little possibility that Microsoft Huihui voice was mistakenly incorporated in the language pack "中文(繁體) - Chinese Traditional (Taiwan)" or "中文(繁體) - Chinese Traditional (Hongkong)". Try to install them.

 

We have just updated our page about the setting of text-to-speech on Windows 10. Please refer to http://www.nlptool.com/TTS.html

 

I am looking forward to knowing your result.

[twinmatrix]

Thanks! For some reason it had installed Taiwanese speech. Got the correct one now.

[LaoDing]

I don't know if there is a demand for this software. Could you please give me some suggestions? Smart Chinese Reader is free. 

 

 

​No it's not. It's a demo. It's really annoying when people play this trick with their software. Why not just say there is a free 30 day trail instead of lying and saying it's free?

 

I have no problems with you getting paid for your work or posting it here, but I do not like false advertising.

 

Other than that, I'd try it out but I'm on a Mac. I would definitely be interested in this software...

 

[yifeng]

Because I am on Spring Festival, the reply is late. Smart Chinese Reader had been a freeware until version 1.9. I think those who have downloaded it can prove this. From version 2.0, it becomes a shareware which users can try for 30 days for free. After the trial period, 29 USD is needed for a license. If you don't want to pay, you can continue using it with all features only except example sentence search. Therefore I have started a new topic for version 2.0 http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/50512-smart-chinese-reader-20/ on  21 December 2015. 

 

But this old topic received a reply on 02 January 2016, it rised and went ahead of the new topic, so you didn't see the new one. Sorry for confusing. If anyone is interested in Smart Chinese Reader, please follow the new topic http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/50512-smart-chinese-reader-20/ from now on.

 

猴年大吉 Good luck Monkey Year!