Hello!
Even though Lingq is without a doubt the greatest language learning site ever I just thought…
how great would it be if one could switch views pingying/characters in Chinese section… Because i have a feeling that when u know how a word sounds it’s a lot easier to learn its character, and learning it all at a time could be a bit overwhelming… So i thought if it’s possible it’d be great if you could add this option!
Thank you)
I thought you could anyway. In the resources tab, there is usually a pinyin section. If you don’t know how to pronounce a certain character, go onto google translate and press “read phoneticly”. That’s what I do, anyway.
Hi Sergey,
Thanks for the great suggestion 
We’ve thought about this before, but one of the major issues is that some characters can have multiple pronunciations and tones, so it makes it difficult to display the accurate Pinyin for these words.
James123 mentions the Pinyin section in the Resources tab, but this will only appear if a user has manually added these.
As a paying member, you can also access Text-to-speech on the blue popups, which makes it easy to hear how the word is pronounced.
Just to be clear, there are a lot of great (and free!) pinyin converters on the internet, such as words-chinese.com
We used these to add Pinyin to our beginner lessons to help out beginners.
If you would like to help out other learners by adding Pinyin to lessons that you are studying, we can certainly make you an editor for Chinese. This would allow you to edit lessons and insert Pinyin into the Resources section. Please let us know if you would be interested in this!
Could you add a pinyin converter into the blue LingQ widget? That way we could have the pinyin and the translation in the hint box.
Hmm, it’s certainly something we could look into and maybe something we could add to our list of future enhancements.
Character to Pinyin is not a 1:1, but a 1:n relationship, even with the help of a big dictionary it’s sometimes not easy to find the correct pinyin of a character.
Google translate includes a read phonetically option, which I copy and paste into my Japanese LingQs.
A comparison of some popular Hanzi-Pinyin-Converters
They tested them with these sentences:
我受不了了。 Wǒ shòubuliǎo le.
发展经济，保障供给。 Fāzhǎn jīngjì, bǎozhàng gōngjǐ.
他个子虽小，力气却很大。 Tā gèzi suī xiǎo, lìqi què hěn dà.
他对滚石乐很感兴趣。 Tā duì gǔnshíyuè hěn gǎn xìngqù.
The result was disappointing, no converter was able to convert all correctly…
Perfection in language is an illusion. Looks pretty good to me. Helpful, even if not perfect.