nciku: A New Online Dictionary

There are certainly quite a few online dictionary and translation tools for Chinese language. But most of them did not solve the problem that one could only look up a Chinese character by its pinyin, which requires the knowledge of the character's pronunciation.

In a traditional Chinese dictionary, one could look up a character either by its pinyin (which is curiously ordered by the English alphabet) or by its radicals and strokes. The latter method is much more useful when encountering an unknown character while reading a book.

Through Pinyin News, I learned a new online dictionary which provides this most important feature: the nciku. It allows the search of characters by radicals, ordered by stroke counts just as a traditional dictionary.

What's more, it also allows one to "write" or draw a character with the mouse. As one draws the character, a table of potential matches are displayed and updated for selection.

The user interface seems to need a little bit of work, but it's a pretty nifty tool.

Another Firefox Addon for Reading Chinese

Another day, another Firefox addon. I learned from Google Operation System of the gTranslate extension that translates any text on a web page into another language just by selecting the text and right clicking the mouse. It's pretty cool. I installed and tested with English-Chinese and Chinese-English translations. It seems to work really well.

However, it does not seem to be able to detect the language of the original text, so one has to switch the translation setting every time when the direction of translation changes between the same two languages.

A Firefox Add-on for Reading Chinese

I learned from Virtual China that there is a add-on for Firefox called Chinesepera-kun which works as a mouse-over Chinese pop-up dictionary for reading online Chinese text. It is pretty cool and does a real good job in recognizing multi-character phrases and provide English translations for multiple options in characters and phrases.

ChinesePod

ChinesePod is a nice podcast site helping English-speaking people learning daily conversational Chinese. The daily MP3 segment is a little over 10 minutes long, centered in a brief situational dialog. They have five different levels of lessons.

I played a "newbie" level lesson to my daughter. She found it interesting. But there is no question that the lessons are aimed at grownups. During the "newbie" lesson at least, the teachers spent a lot of time talking in English. But they explain the Chinese context and tones fairly well.

The other shortcoming of this site is that only the daily podcast itself is free. To access all other materials, including transcripts, you have to register and pay (after a week-long free trial period).

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.