Chinese language

You are currently browsing articles tagged Chinese language.

The Father of Pinyin (Pīnyīn zhī fù)

8 August 2008 by alex | No comments

The Father of Pinyin

An illiteracy rate in China in the last 50 years has dropped from 80% to 10%.  In this fascinating 4 minute interview in February, 102 year old Zhou Youguang remembers being told by the Communist government to create the pinyin romanization system in the 1950s.  Pinyin has become the standard mechanism for learning how to pronounce Chinese characters, both inside and outside of China.  To Zhou and his system, I am greatly indebted.  Now if I can only memorize several hundred more characters…

Tags: ,

In Pursuit of the Chinese Language

18 June 2008 by alex | 1 comment

I have been working on my Chinese literacy skills and the engineer in me has been increasingly frustrated with the lack of good software to aid these endeavors.  So, today, I introduce Pingguo Chinese-English Dictionary, for the Mac OS X, of course. ;)

Pingguo Chinese-English Dictionary

Tags: , , ,

Pingguo Dictionary

18 June 2008 by alex | 18 comments

Made for use with OS X’s Dictionary program, Pingguo leverages the public domain Chinese-English dictionary files of CC-CEDICT.

Pingguo Dictionary 1.0.0.1 (Pinyin Edition) Pingguo Dictionary 1.0.0.1 (Zhuyin Edition)

Requirements

  • Mac OS X 10.5+

Version History

1.0.0.1 – June 3, 2009

  • No functional changes.
  • Based on the 2009-06-03 05:51:07 GMT release of CC-CEDICT.

1.0 – November 10, 2008

  • Split into two dictionary files — one for Pinyin and the other for Zhuyin.
  • Gives pronunciation in contextual menu dictionary panel.
  • Using different fonts for traditional and simplified characters.
  • Based on the 2008-11-08 21:00:48 GMT release of CC-CEDICT.

0.6 – July 7, 2008

  • Added support for Zhuyin fuhao (bopomofo).  The display of the phonetic system can be configured in the dictionary application’s Preferences.
  • Based on the 2008-05-25 11:49:13 GMT release of CC-CEDICT.

0.5 – June 18, 2008

  • First public release.
  • Includes searches based on Chinese characters (traditional and simplified), pinyin (with or within tone marks) and English.
  • Based on the 2008-05-25 11:49:13 GMT release of CC-CEDICT.

Copyright © 2008-2009 Alexander Chow. Dictionary contents are distributed as CC-CEDICT by MDBG under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.

Tags: ,