Hi folks!

(short summary: I am looking for something like this,
http://www.chinese-tools.com/songs/song/94/putong-pengyou.html
but for iOS and for any kind of text).


I was wondering if anyone can help me with a concrete need.

I figure that by just skrittering I will not see all the characters often enough to get them burned into my brain, so my idea was, to have a tool (preferably an app, but in any case, it needs to work on iphone/ipad), which offers me easy (and I mean, dumbass level...) Chinese texts and an option for onmouse-over translation of the characters.

The idea came up when a friend of mine told me the other day she was reading an English book on Kindle, and her Kindle translated for the the words in the book she didn't know.

Some time ago I checked out a website with manually selected Chinese texts and user-added translations (dont remember the name), but first of all, it was not onmouseover (you had to change the entire text's language to see the meaning), and on the other side, the levels were crap... in beginner or low intermediate they had texts about carbon dioxide emission, footprints etc., (wtf!).

If there is anything out there like what I am looking for, I appreciate your recommendation :)

I use Pleco. You have to invest some money, but when you learn Chinese, I don't think you can anything wrong when you pay about 30$ for Pleco. Also it's connected with Skritter, so you can easily look up words. It has many more features. On of the features is the reader. I suppose you can try it for free.

If you are on a PC, you can use one of the many Chinese browser add-Ons that will show you the translation, pinyin etc. when you hover over the Chinese word.

On the PC I use the add-on Zhongwen Chinese Popup Dictionary in my Chrome browser.
Hovering over the text gives a good translation. It also has a connection to Skritter for adding words.

zhangyanglu, I just found this site www.nulinu.li which is for reading practice, it's still in beta, but you can get an account by going here (it's an invite thingy, I got two by accident) http://t.co/rDXdBhhBr7 the website also works on my iPhone in a mobile version too, which is nifty.

Hi zhangyanglu, as Russel mentioned, www.nulinu.li may suit your need. We don't use levels. We use the vocab your now.

You can copy-paste any text you find in the search bar, it was analyse it like the tools you mention, plus a color code to help you identify which words you don't know yet. One click and it's added to your learning list!

TIP: Do the same with a Pleco or Skritter export of your vocab, and in one click you're ready to use Nuli!努力! with a dictionary that will give your examples at your level.

For now the beta doesn't recommend texts yet, but we can help you choose which words to learn next (the easiest ones considering the words and characters you already now) as well as Tweets you should be able to read in Chinese. Very easy ones if you don't know many words, up to financial reports announcements from the Financial Times if you have a lot of economic vocab for instance. It's filtered to YOUR level. (~80% understanding)

We are using invites till July 16th (next Tuesday), feel free to ask for one just now www.nulinu.li! People registering before the 16th will be considered as "early users" and will get new features first in the future. After, we are swtiching to public beta and you ll be able to register freely.

Good luck with the learning using the various tools, feel free to ask for features! It's a werb-app so it works on any device or browser, but you need to be online (for now)

I just imported my words from skritter to nuli, this is how I did it.

1. export words using the export words wizard here in skritter.

2. copy and paste all the words into excel or similar program.

3. select and copy the column with only the Chinese characters.

4. paste into notepad++ (google it if you don't have it).

5. select all Chinese words/characters in notepad++.

6. Press Ctrl-J to "Join Lines" (also found in Edit) so it's just one long line, rather than each word on separate lines.

7. copy/cut and paste 500 or so characters at a time into the search bar in nuli. (notepad++ tells you how many you are selecting in the bottom right of the window), nuli can't support too many words or characters at the same time apparently, not sure what the limit is, I got a url too long error when I pasted all the words into the search bar at first.

8. Press enter in the search bar and then mark all words as learned.

9. repeat 7. and 8. until all your words are incorporated into nuli. (didn't take me long as I only have a few hundred).

Done. Any questions let me know. Maybe there's an easier way to do this. You may need to convert your characters to simplified as nuli is simplified only at the moment. But you can use New Tong Wen Tang to view the characters as traditional once they are in the nuli system.

I don't know any program that does exactly what you want.

But if you have a mac, look at http://www.byzanti.co.uk/ It shows you definitions for words, highlights and lists unknown words, and has the option to add unknown words for skritter.

I use Chinese Reader everyday. So I'm looking forward to seeing if nuli can do even better.

Hi Russel,

TIP to go faster, you can mix Chinese and English in the copy-paste text. It means you can raw copy paste your import. Nuli will only colour the Chinese ones and you can directly "Mark all as learned" your words.
They is no issues with words being on the same line on not either. The most brutal ways of copy pasting should work.

They is indeed a limitation for now linked to the type of field we use. With a very big text, we noticed the search querry could be pretty long, and people did not wait till the end so the limitation was not an issue so far.

When you'll export your Pleco words, try it ;)
With the method you describe, I'm using Excel for the Skritter exports, paste in Excel, then use "convert" that creates the column by detecting the tabs. Then you just select the first column (containing Chinese only) every 500 lines or so and paste it in the nuli bar.

We are trying to keep some flexbility in the use people make of features,that's why there is no how-to yet. May be a bit disturbing, but some users are inveting ways to use nuli that they might not have tried if they followed a whole tutorial before.

When on my iPad, I also use Pleco's document reader to do my reading of Chinese with tap-to-show on words I don't know. It rocks.

Thanks Nick, I didn't know about that part of pleco because when I started with Chinese, it seemed too expensive to me; now I had some check on the screenshot documentation on their website and I think it might be exactly what I was looking for (although the design of the reader is horrible; reminds me of Notepad...)

russell359, thanks a lot for your recommendation! I used your invitation link for nuli and think it's a really really nice tool, with a lot of potential. Since Thomas has also written here, I'd like to give some feedback.

Thomas, the implementation of my known chars worked fine, especially since I only focus on HSK lists right now. What I am missing is an offline mode (maybe a native app like Skritter, which allows me to download texts in advance and later sync with your servers) and most important, more reviews. Only 6 per page/load is not enough for me.
If I want to use it on my subway rides to work, I need to have enough reviews available at least to overcome 10 to 20 minutes without internet coverage.
The performance of the interface itself is also rather slow. As a user I would expect the website to pre-fetch all the possible information. If I have to wait 2 or 3 secs for the translation or the character explanation to pop up, it's too long; this information should pop up immediately without any delay.

Same for the live feed (I love that!).
The chance to download by once, a bigger package (dunno, 2, 3 DIN A4 pages of text) with ALL the char information and translations, would definetely be helpful.

There's a tool call pera pera pop up Chinese dictionary plug in. There's Chrome, Firefox, and IE version. You can use it on both PC and Mac. It's building within the browser. Check it out, and good luck learning!


Lilaoshi

FWIW, the Pleco reader design is getting a lot better - see this video at https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10151440261885771&set=vb.177058040727&type=2&theater for an idea of how it works in our next update (though the icons are still temporary and we may tweak some other bits of the design too).

I remember having read that that update will not be out anyways before summer 2014?

No, should be out this fall, about the same time as iOS 7.

Hmm, I should have posted in the first place with my skritter account, I haven't been notified of all your posts folks, sorry ;)

zhangyanglu, I understand the issue. It's a matter of trade-offs

I never want to get into the debate about apps:
- will it be iOS7 only?
- why not android first?
- why can't I synchronise?
- when will it be updated ?
- why is the plug-in only FFox and just a beta for Chrome
- why is one version free and not the other etc?

>> A responsive web-app is not as fast as a native off-line app. However, we can push 3 to 4 changes PER DAY, and that gives us a reactivity to correct things or try new stuff for our users everyday. We are only 2 people at the moment and won't code simultaneously several versions of code depending on platforms, browers. However, we are investigating client-side solutions for offline study.

>> Every couple of weeks, when the features tend to stabilize, we optimise the page load time and speed.

I have the same issue in the subway, even though reception is getting better and better everywhere :)
If we pre-load more things for the intermittent reception case, it means that every user will need to load more every time. Not everyone has a big or unlimited data plan, and not every mobile browser handles well async' loading. I'll find a solution to enable you to display more reviews before you get in the subway (for instance, with a "load 10 more reviews" similar to what you can find in the live feed)

nkantor, PPK was my first internet tool. But now I have a mobile, a work laptop, a personal laptop, and swtich between browsers. A plug-in can't cope with that, and it doesn't seem to solve zhangyanglu initial issue about assesing the level of the content.

mikelove, I still use Pleco (not as much as before, though) and look forward to the new release.

Cheers and good luck learning!

(deleted)

Hey @zhangyanglu @russel359,

We just released a new feature. You can now store any kind of text (even mixing Chinese and English), and study it specifically (learn vocab, review vocab, track your progress).

It's a Chinese reader that knows your vocabulary, and creates automatically of list of the ones you still need to learn/review :)

So exactly what you were looking for!
It's called "FOCUS list", available here: http://nulinu.li