Is it possible to display pinyin pronunciation for Mandarin Chinese?

[Alec]

When I click on a word in Chinese, it will say the word aloud and give a translation in English, but not the pinyin pronunciation. This makes it a difficult to learn how each character is supposed to be pronounced. Is it possible to display the pinyin when clicking on a word or reviewing it through the vocab list?

[William]

My suggestion for right now is to just have the dictionary tab open so that it looks up the character or word you clicked on, with the appropriate pinyin or bopomofo pronunciation.

With Chinese Mandarin, usually there’s only one pronunciation per character, but some characters do have multiple pronunciations, or differ in pronunciation depending on whether it’s Taiwanese or Chinese Mandarin. So, while Steve could probably set up something to add the pronunciation automatically to the translation, it’d always be safer just to check with an actual dictionary. mdbg.net (Chinese-English) and moedict.tw (Chinese-Chinese/English/French/German) are both dictionaries that work with Readlang, I think.

[William]

Actually, I found a solution for you. If you turn on the “Ask AI” feature in “Settings” under the experimental tab, you can prompt the AI to give the Pinyin pronunciation of a character in the “Explain” tab while reading. It’s still good to double-check with a dictionary, but it’s a solution.

I’ve used the following prompts so far:
“What’s the pinyin pronunciation for this word?”
“這個字的拼音是什麼？” for an answer in Mandarin.

[Steve]

Thanks for the feedback! I agree this is an obvious missing feature (along with furigana for Japanese and other transliterations for other languages) which I should implement and hope to at some point. No promises though.

@William

Actually, I found a solution for you. If you turn on the “Ask AI” feature in “Settings” under the experimental tab, you can prompt the AI to give the Pinyin pronunciation of a character in the “Explain” tab while reading. It’s still good to double-check with a dictionary, but it’s a solution.

That’s a great use of the Ask AI! Note that only premium users are able to turn on this feature. Here’s some more info about it: Ask AI: custom ChatGPT prompt feature for premium users (experimental)

[Steve]

I’ve now implemented pinyin as an experimental feature: Calling Japanese and Chinese learners! Please try new furigana and pinyin feature (experimental). Please try it out!