Is this the right place to offer the pinyin version of the Text for this lesson? (This was produced by pasting the Chinese transcript into Google Translate)
Google’s not bad, though they sometimes get the tone mark wrong, for the few characters that can have more than one tone. Also, they show the retroflex final as er, whereas University textbooks (ie. Beijing Press) show it as simply r at the end of a word (though I have to remember to type er when using character software to type). eg. 一点儿 is ‘Yīdiǎn er’ by Google, but listed as ‘yīdiǎnr’ in my dictionary and textbooks.
I prefer to use Chinese Text Annotation - MandarinSpot since it gives the option to show the text with in-line pinyin above the characters, and mouse over annotation. There is an additional option to have the vocab with translation listed once you check ‘for printing’ box. One can choose all vocab, or just certain HSK level vocab. Also option to sort by frequency etc. I paste the vocab section into my Word doc, but print the annotated section, since that part get scrambled when pasted.
Really fantastic tool - I learned about this tool from Luca Lampariello’s blog (polyglotta80).
Aside from that, having the Google pinyin showing in a particular lesson forum is handy for me personally, though Admin recommends we do without translations.
Interesting resources. The place to put these is in the Resources area when you load a lesson. Then choose either Lesson Notes or Script Conversion . If you are not the lesson provider you may have to ask us for the editor pencil in order to be able to get into the lesson and add these resources. Maybe Alex can add some information here.
Thanks Julz611 for the tip. There’s some nice features about the mandarinspot annotator, however, when typing in characters I think it might be easier to use the Google platform because with instant translate turned on, you can see the pinyin immediately, whereas with the mandarin spot you need to click the Annotate button after each character you type.
Also, if you want to copy the annotated text and paste it somewhere else, as I did above, there’s a problem since the pinyin and the characters are combined and then each word is placed on a separate line.
Steve, I believe I did what you suggested. The only resource which was available for this lesson was “Lesson Forum” which opened up the input screen where I entered in this posting. If there is a place to choose “lesson Notes” or “Script Conversion” I don’t see it unless I’m simply looking in the wrong place.