Any ability to have both Pinyin and Characters in Reader?

[JD]

I had the audacity this week to overestimate my tiny Chinese capabilities and try to learn some Mandopop song lyrics. The lyrics weren't available by default with the American iTunes Store, but I was able to go to Mojim.com and find the lyrics.

What I found was that there are SOOOOOO many characters I've never seen before used in the songs. Even using the Reader, I recognized hardly any of the characters. That's when I realized it would be fantastic to have both the PinYin and the Characters shown simultaneously. What I'm talking about is something like you see in Groundfinch or Readmersion (both iOS apps...see attached image for example of Groundfinch).

I poked through the setting for Pleco but didn't see anything. The closest I could get was to have the Reader read the lyrics and show the definition bubble at the same time. This doesn't quite have the same "smooth" effect when trying to memorize song lyrics.

Is it there but I'm missing it? If not, please consider this a request to include a capability like this.

EDIT: one additional capability that would be cool is a Traditional/Simplified switch. I know it's difficult going S->T, but many of the songs are by Taiwanese artist, and hence the default lyrics one easily finds are in Traditional...but I'm learning Simplified and if there was a simple conversion tool, that would be great.

 

[朱真明]

If I was in your situation, I would just try and memorize the pronunciation of the characters that I don't know, unless you have no interest in learning those characters and just want to sing the song.

 

[JD]

Long-term, memorizing the unknown characters is the goal. However, being able to have some short-term success is important in that it maintains the motivation to meet the long-term goal. I see the PinYin as a pronunciation guide that I'd be able to reference while learning, until I have enough knowledge that I can turn it off.

 

[Shun]

As a temporary solution, did you know you could also add Pinyin pronunciations using Pages for Mac and iPad? Paste the text into Pages and right click, then the text will look something like this:



Then you could save it as PDF and open in the Reader.

 

[mikelove]

It's something we've gone back and forth on for a while - support for ruby text in general is already coming (in Android in our next update and on iOS hopefully soon after), mostly for the sake of adding ruby Zhuyin to MoEDict headwords but it'll be useful in other places too, but we're not yet sure whether enough people would use it in the reader to justify adding it.

We are however working on bolstering our capabilities for automatically generating pinyin from characters anyway (as already evinced in the automatic generation of readings for new custom dictionary entries / flashcards), so between that and the fact that we're already adding ruby text in dictionary entries it should soon be pretty easy for us to do this.

 

[JD]

As a temporary solution, did you know you could also add Pinyin pronunciations using Pages for Mac and iPad? Paste the text into Pages and right click, then the text will look something like this:

...deletia...

Then you could save it as PDF and open in the Reader.

THAT is really interesting. I did not know you could do that. I really appreciate your taking the time to show me a new capability!

I use an iPad almost exclusively and have been using Pages as the intermediate to store the lyrics as I format them. I had never seen the "PHONETIC" option appear when selecting text in Pages though. I realized after playing a bit with it that you can only select small sections of text to get the automatic formatting available. My lyrics are broken out one line per line of song...and Pages only makes the option to show the PinYin available if I do NOT have new line characters.

So my options would be to either select and convert each line of song individually or take out all the formatting.

 

[JD]

It's something we've gone back and forth on for a while -

...deletia....

so between that and the fact that we're already adding ruby text in dictionary entries it should soon be pretty easy for us to do this.

I understand the need to balance the workload. The PinYin is a "nice to have", but I'd rather have the "massive flashcard update" first!

 

[Shun]

THAT is really interesting. I did not know you could do that. I really appreciate your taking the time to show me a new capability!

I use an iPad almost exclusively and have been using Pages as the intermediate to store the lyrics as I format them. I had never seen the "PHONETIC" option appear when selecting text in Pages though. I realized after playing a bit with it that you can only select small sections of text to get the automatic formatting available. My lyrics are broken out one line per line of song...and Pages only makes the option to show the PinYin available if I do NOT have new line characters.

So my options would be to either select and convert each line of song individually or take out all the formatting.

You're welcome! You're right, the way to work around this would be to delete the newlines and replace them with commas. Should be good enough for practice.

 

[Miguel]

Anyway to do this in Linux?

 

[MMarks]

Google Translate will add pinyin too.

 

[Miguel]

That's true , the only bad thing is that living in China accessing Google services is not always so easy...