Tools for putting pinyin above characters?

[hismaimai8888]

Hi!

I'm again thinking of reading a lot of books quickly to solidify the words and their usage I've learned over the last while. For that I want to put the pinyin above the words. Are there any tools out there that allow me to do entire books almost in one go, and that give good results?

[DavyJonesLocker]

I never found this to be a good idea as your eyes are invariably pulled towards the pinyin rather than the characters. The Chinese  Graded Reader Series do this but it's very problematic for many. If you are trying to solidify the words, looking at the pinyin wouldn't do that in my opinion. Ij you need to check so many words I'd say it's better to drop down to an easier read.  However everyone knows their own learning style !

 

Perhaps Pleco screen reader would be an acceptable halfway house? It is very quick to tap on the icon and look at the unfamiliar words. 

 

Amazon Kindle has a language option but as far as I can remember the installed dictionaries only had Chinese to English (no pinyin) or Chinese to Chinese (pinyin). I don't have my kindle anymore but the Kindle app seems to have C --> C (Pinyin) , C --> E (no pinyin).

 

Having said all that I find Chinese Readers better . My HuaWei Read app that came pre installed with the phone and tablet is pretty good. They have built in audio, and one tap dict that shows pinyin, Chinese and English definitions all in one. 

[mungouk]

Purple Culture in HK have an online tool that will do it, with several nice options.

 

Check out their other handy gizmos under the "Chinese Tools" menu — quite a few interesting things there.

 

Input: 我们的生活每天都在发生变化

 

Output:

 

 

You can export the result as a Word, PDF, or Mobi file.

 

 

[amytheorangutan]

I used this website I found last week but I highly doubt you can do a whole book https://mandarinspot.com/annotate 

[mungouk]

9 hours ago, DavyJonesLocker said:

your eyes are invariably pulled towards the pinyin rather than the characters

 

Yes I find this to be a problem.

@hismaimai8888, the Sinolingua graded Chinese readers come with a little template you can put over the page, to hide the pinyin.  I posted a "backup" of the template in case anyone loses theirs.

 

If you're making the books yourself, maybe you could export the Word file and edit it so that you have Hanzi on one page and Pinyin on the opposite, like some bilingual texts do?

 

Anyway, having an editable Word version of the annotated text will give you multiple options.  An ebook where you can switch the annotation on and off would be cool.

 

Where are you sourcing the text of the books?

 

 

[Shelley]

There is always this, but I had some problems with it last time I used it, something to do with the Ruby text, so I haven't tried it for awhile.

 

https://www.eduhk.hk/ocio/content/faq-how-add-phonetic-guides-注音標示-text-ms-word

[mungouk]

11 minutes ago, Shelley said:

There is always this

 

Well, how about that. It worked for me using my ancient installation of Word for Mac 2011.  

 

I had no idea that language register thing existed. 

 

The spacing of the pinyin is a bit weird though.

 

 

Edit: Turns out there's a setting for that:

 

 

 

 

[Shelley]

Thats good, I think I need to update my version of word, when I had a new PC earlier this year and had to install everything from scratch I think I used word 2007 instead of 2010 by mistake. This has brought it to light.

 

I wonder if some skillful manipulating of the formatting could solve the spacing problem?

 

 

[mungouk]

8 hours ago, Shelley said:

I wonder if some skillful manipulating of the formatting could solve the spacing problem?

 

See edit above. The Alignment setting in the dialogue fixed it.

 

I don't remember hearing of "Ruby text" before, although I'm familiar with Furigana for Kanji.  Learned something today

[Shelley]

That is excellent, @mungouk, thats what I call team work, although  really all I did was point you in the right direction and you did all the rest. I am going to sort my Word, its so useful.

[Bibu]

google translate, set source and target  both CN

 

[imron]

Just be aware that whatever automated tool you use, there will invariably be errors.  Usually around one or two a paragraph.