I have been studying mandarin for about five months using certian texts and Rosetta Stone software. I just signed up for LingQ about eight days ago. The system is working well for continuing my studies of Spanish, but the mandarin material would be much better if I was able to toggle the display of Pinyin in addition to the english translation. It is possible that this might not be so important to me in the future when I learn more, but at my beginner ability is is difficult for me to benefit quickly from the mandarin tutorials due to the lack of pinyin and the english translation not being displayed close to the simplified characters. I do want to be able to toggle the display to advance from working familiarity to working on recall, but I need to become familiar with the material before I can work on recall.
I also have been advised that the pinyin is only a rough approximation of the actual pronunciation and that I will need to further refine my pronounciation by listening to the mp3 recordings and working with a tutor.
I don’t think it’s exactly what you’re after, but when I LingQ a word in Japanese, I add the pronunciation as well as the meaning (so it appears as “() ”), then I can hover the mouse of the word afterwards to see the pronunciation as well as the meaning. This won’t give you a way to see them side by side, but may prove helpful.
When I studied Chinese at LingQ, I did exactly what Lyise is suggesting. I found this was quite helpful in learning new characters, and when I reviewed flashcards I then always had access to the Pinyin if I needed it. After seeing it enough times, I learned the characters and the sounds, but seeing the Pinyin in the Hint every time I reviewed the word was helpful in progressing.
Since you’re at a beginning stage, I encourage you to do a lot of repetition of the same content. We have 3 main beginner collections here at LingQ: Greetings and Goodbyes, Eating Out and Who is She. I listened to each of these upwards of 30 times, and it helped a lot in learning new words and getting a better feel for what Mandarin sounds like.
Lyise, thanks for the response. I have been copying and pasting the information into my own documents in order to become familiar with the material. I apologize for the run on sentences in my post. It makes it difficult for non native speakers to understand what I am asking. I want to display the chinese characters, pinyin, and english translation close together for becoming familiar with the new vocabulary. I also want to be able to toggle ( display text and hide text ) the display of pinyin and english when I am working on recall of the vocabulary.
Hi Stoney,
would u like to try google translate…
set english translate to chinese…
for example…
type in english on the left, translation will be shown on the right…
good morning 早上好
good 好
morning 上午
do you see the speaker sign and ä sign…
click the speaker sign: speak the text out…
click the ä sign: display the pinyin at the bottom of the table…
Zǎoshang hǎo
Hǎo
Shàngwǔ
this is the easiest way to learn any foreign language…
but, beware the accuracy of the translation is not good enough…
.
Hello Stoney,
You are right, it would be very helpful if the providers of Chinese beginner content could add Pinyin in the lesson notes. For some Japanese beginner content the providers have added romaji transliteration and it helps a lot.
For those lessons without transliteration, I do what others have described and added it to all my LingQs. In time your brain marries them together. Then you get annoyed by lessons in Teach Yourself books which only provide phonetic versions, and not the “proper” writing system.
Enjoy your studies!
PS You realise you have made progress when you start spotting the mistakes in computer-generated transliterations 
On many of the classes, i’ve added the pinyin. But like stoney I would love it If i could have some of lessons in pinyin text. Even it was listed as two different courses Mandarin and Mandarin (pinyin)
I use lingq every day for my french and spanish but I just can’t get along using it with characters for my chinese. I am learning characters but in a very slow way compared to usage of pinyin.
I’ve just had a good look for any firefox plug-in that could maybe translate the text on the page to pinyin, but i can’t find any.
Here is my opinion on how the issue should be addressed: http://getsatisfaction.com/lingq/topics/a_suggestion_for_a_new_field_in_lingqs_for_grammatical_and_phonetic_information
When I worked through the wolf and huahua series I just cut and pasted the entire transcript into mdbg. This displays the characters, pinyin and english next to each other for each word.
I just listened to the content, and then read the transcript on mdbg by scrolling down. I still do this for cntv news and the higher level text over at cslpod. This is what works for me.
The other benefit of mdbg, is that I can see how words are used in other contexts via the links to jukuu, or how individual characters are used with other characters through the x links.
This may or may not be helpful, but there are fonts that come with the Pinyin included. They have several drawbacks, including being hard to find and not free.
If you are technically adept you could probably install the font and get it to work as the default Chinese font in you browser and then all Chinese will have pinyin. I did not do that, but I have set it as the default Chinese font on my Kindle and that makes reading Chinese very easy. I have also found that my character recognition has improved without having to drill characters.
@bobafruit Interesting! Could you name any of those (fonts)?
@hape Thanks for that mandarinspot link that works great. If only it did the same thing lingq. I just tried copying and pasting it into the pinyin translation section for a lesson but it didn’t work. But that doesn’t really matter because I can use these lingq and mandarinspot side by side
@hape Absolutely, that is one of the larger drawbacks, but I find that for me it is good enough.
here’s a set that costs $50 Under Construction you may be able to find one for free somewhere.