Tool to show pinyin over highlighted character

[mtaplits]

HI everyone,

I'm fairly conversational in Mandarin after living in China for two years. I want to begin now to read. I think the best way for me to go about this is to begin reading blogs etc on websites since I can do it in my spare time and also see normal everyday conversation.

I'm looking for a tool that when I place my mouse over a character on a website it will show me the pinyin.

Does this exist?

Thanks,

Marshall

[Romain]

KingSoft PowerWord Chinese 2005 is quite effective. While it only shows the definition of the character upon rollover of mouse, within that popup window there is a button for the immediate audio pronunciation. Also, there is a magnifying glass button which opens up the whole definition in the program itself. Within that you will find the written pinyin with tones.

Good luck

[onebir]

Try the rather good dimsum tool at mandarintools... It can give you mouseover pinyin, and because it segments the text into words - clumping together the characters that go together, it can also provide dictionary definitions that are usually meaningful (unlike those for individual characters in many instances). It can also annotate whole chunks of text with pinyin if you want something to print out and ponder over off line. It had a few bugs when I last looked at it, about six months back, but they weren't major.

And it's free, courtesy of the very kind Erik Petersen, who i think participates in this forum....

[gato]

Try http://www.rikai.com/perl/HomePage.pl?Language=Zh

or http://www.popjisyo.com/WebHint/AddHint.aspx?d=8&e=GB2312&r=e&s=0&du=&u=http%3a%2f%2fcn.news.yahoo.com%2f

See also this earlier thread on this topic:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/35-traditional-simplified-characters41

[trevelyan]

Adsotrans does contextual text segmentation and grammatical analysis of text, and provides what it believes is the best English gloss for the Chinese word. This is a bit more complex than a dictionary lookup, and may or may not be what you need. It is the engine powering NewsinChinese though so you can check it out. The system supports complex and simplified texts, and offers a variety of annotation options on the advanced page. You may be interested in "toneover" or "pintone".

The backend dictionary has about 150,000 entries and is shared in an open source fashion with several other non-commercial projects and online dictionaries, including MDGB and ZDT. We are also supporting learning tools like Plecodict in an effort to lower the cost of decent study materials. Users are encouraged to submit missing entries to the backend database -- a simple online form allows for real-time submissions, which are reviewed regularly.

If you plan to read online material and find Adso useful you may be interested in the Firefox plugin that provides automatic annotation in a popup window on demand for any Chinese webpage. Just press the 'a' button and click on Chinese text to submit it to the server for instant annotation. No need to copy and paste, or install any software. Details online here:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/7087-firefox-plugin-chinese-text-annotation

[mtaplits]

Thanks everyone!