I’ve added an experimental feature which uses ChatGPT to provide furigana (Japanese) and pinyin (Chinese) transliterations of text you highlight (in addition to the usual translations of course).
To enable this, open the Settings page and at the bottom, enable the new showTransliterations option:
Hi Steve! I just tried out the new functionality for Mandarin, and it works great. It’s really impressive how fast you implemented that!
I think this is a great tool for Chinese, as having the pinyin/bopomofo (Taiwanese version) next to the words is exactly how it’s done in textbooks for native children and foreigners. The same info is always in a dictionary, but it’s nice to have it next to the word, too, I think.
I like it so far! And I agree with William that there should be an option to choose between pinyin and bopomofu (zhuyin), since some learners prefer the BPMF.
A little feedback from my quick look – this was my first time using Chinese because I am not actively studying it, so I just grabbed a text from the Library and selected random words – apologies if these things have been mentioned a bunch before:
The load time of the pinyin is a little slow. It takes an extra second for it to appear after the translation.
Some of the tone marks are displaying incorrectly. It seems like mostly first tone is getting messed up (See screenshot)
Is there a way to set a different default font size for each language? I already had to increase my screen size for the characters, and the pinyin is quite small and cramped above the translation. The bold translated words on the right are also really hard to read.
Other Chinese things (not specifically about the pinyin)
There’s no capitalization in Chinese writing, but the translations to English seem to just randomly decide whether or not to capitalize a word. I’d prefer all lowercase, but perhaps a toggle in the settings could give the choice. I saw capitalization as an issue in another post, so perhaps you’re working on that across all languages.
I noticed that my saved words in Chinese did not remain underlined after reopening the document, the way my French vocab does. I couldn’t find any place to turn that on in the settings, so perhaps it’s a bug or just not a supported feature yet for this language?
In the public texts and on the site, Chinese is lumped into one category, but it would be nice to be able to choose your desired flavor: Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), or Cantonese. I noticed when selecting a public text to test out the pinyin that I needed to scroll and click around a lot to find a Traditional Chinese text, and a way to filter them would have been nice.
Sorry for the late response, I’ve just saw this and tried the feature and it’s GREAT!!
This will help me a lot with my Japanese studies.
thank you, thank you, thank you!
