Hello Erik8970!
we will look into it
When Zoran says they will look into this, it means he will contact the developers and suggest they improve the transcription algorithm, nothing more nothing less. Your misunderstanding might be that you assume that the Pinyin is saved alongside each lesson, this is not the case. It gets generated automatically. Feel free to verify this by creating a lesson for yourself. So asking LingQ to correct single instances of incorrect Pinyin isn’t expedient in my opinion.
add it in the word definition
This is no joke.
Adding the Pinyin to the definitions has the following advantages:
- The user is in control and is thus not subject to the vicissitudes of an algorithm
- Ergonomic positioning together with the translation
- Able to capture phrases and non-dictionary words
It is easy and intuitive to add Pinyin to the definitions for two reasons:
- The vast majority of existing user hints already contain Pinyin
- The vast majority of dictionaries already contain Pinyin, so when a user adds a hint they can just copy the Pinyin together with the translation
There is only one pinyin for a character/meaning combination
Please consider the following three points, how do you suggest solving these cases using a dictionary based algorithm?
-
Three common characters: 地 的 着
-
The issue of tone sandhi, dictionaries typically do not include those, however a learner may prefer to see those for didactic reasons.
-
What if a user prefers, for example Taiwanese Mandarin pronunciation?
Please also take this additional factor into account when assessing the situation: Languages such as Chinese and Japanese are written without natural delimiters like spaces, so word segmentation is essential for a platform like LingQ. This process is however by no means perfect, resulting in many words that will not appear in any dictionary (maybe 10-15%). How do intend to solve this problem?
Just for your information
Thank you for clearing this up. As for myself, I’m just a humble student of this endlessly fascinating language and I do hope you will continue to share your valuable expertise here on the forum so that I can learn from it. It is great to have you.