Adso: A Nice On-line Tool for Chinese Language

There are quite a few online language tools such as Babel Fish and Google. But they are no help if you happen upon a character that you don't know how to pronounce. Or if you, like me, need to find the exact Pinyin of a character for teaching purposes.

That is where Adso would come handy. I found this nice little site today, where you can input Chinese characters and phrases and it will provide their Pinyin and English translation right away. It seems to be a very decent job.

Now, most Chinese inputting method use Pinyin itself, so it would be really hard to input things without knowing the Pinyin first! But if you have the characters handy in a web page or document, you can just copy and paste them onto the site.

The site promises to do a lot more than this, such as textbooks, reading materials, and news in Chinese. But those features lag far behind the handy pinyin/translation tool. The site navigation also needs some work. But through some digging, I find they also have other projects, such as Chinese flash cards, online dictionary, and a Firefox plugin. I will have to find out more about those later.