Toshuō

The Romajinator was tool I made for converting Japanese Katakana into romaji, i.e., roman characters. I’ve recently updated it so that it can also convert Hiragana into romaji. Any serious student of Japanese will have no more problems reading hiragana or katakana than a student of Chinese would have reading pinyin.

It’s mostly just for fun, but for people living in China or other countries in Asia, it might be useful.

Examples

さむらい   ->   samurai 
にんじゃ   ->   ninja 
いちご     ->   ichigo  ->  strawberry
いぬ       ->   inu     ->  dog

Pronunciation

In general, romaji vowels are pronounced fairly similarly to pinyin vowels. The big exception is the “e”, which sounds a bit closer to a “short e” in English. The “o” sounds somewhat like an English “long o”. Vowels with a macron bar over them are voiced for a longer period of time. Doubled consonants represent a pause before the consonant. For example “kippu” would sound like “key”, followed by a pause, and then “poo”.

The above is obviously a very rough explanation. For a more pronunciation guide, I recommend the Wikimedia Commons: Japanese pronunciation page.

The newest version of the Sinosplice Tooltip plugin for WordPress is out! I chipped in and helped John and Andy a little bit this time with code from my pinyin tools, so it now displays pinyin with tone marks in its pop-ups.

If you have a wordpress blog and you ever put Chinese phrases into your posts, this is definitely worth checking out. With the plugin, you can enter translations or pinyin to pop-up when when your readers mouse over the Chinese characters in your post.

Here’s an example: 中秋節

You can download the plugin at its page and you can see a usage and installation tutorial on Sinosplice.

I’ve long been an occasional user of the Perapera-kun plug-in for Firefox. It’s pretty handy for quickly looking up Japanese words online.

Once it was installed, you could right-click on any web page, pick “perapera” from the right-click menu, and then hovering the mouse over any word bring up a pop-up display with both the English translation and the pronunciation of the word in question. The Chinese version worked pretty much the same way.

Unfortunately, the developer decided to merge the Chinese and Japanese plugins and abandon the old right click interface and instead add an icon at the bottom right hand corner of the screen (incidentally, the same spot I use for my pinyin plugin). Instead of text, the developer decided to use flags.

Here is the result:

Using flags is a poor user design choice

Needless to say there are a lot of people in Taiwan who would rather not fly the PRC flag on their desktops. Though I’m not a very political person myself, I felt a bit uncomfortable with this on the computers at my office after the upgrades today. I doubt the secretary would much care for seeing it and while I could explain it to her, it could be more awkward if students see it on the computers.

An icon with the character 中 would be a better choice. Also, from a purely functional standpoint, I miss the right-click interface. It was much quicker than having to go to the lower right-hand corner of my browser and make two clicks.

I’ve made a Firefox extension that converts pinyin with tone numbers into pinyin with tone marks. The specifics of the conversion process are identical to those of the online pinyin converter I wrote earlier.

After installing the extension, a blue square will appear on the right side of the status bar at the bottom of your Firefox web browser. To use the tool, type some pinyin with tone numbers into any plain text field on any web page. Then highlight the text and click on the blue 拼 on your status bar. It will convert the tone numbers into the appropriate marks over the appropriate vowels.

For example, if you type in “zhong1wen2″, highlight it and hit the button, then it will be converted into “zhōngwén”.

Thanks to John for feedback on the design, and to Wayne and Andrew for testing on Mac and Linux machines.

Go to the download page to get it.

Chinese Perakun is one of my favorite tools for reading Chinese online. It’s a Firefox plug-in for Chinese learners. When it’s enabled, it displays a pop-up with an English translation a pinyin pronunciation and larger version of the character. Below is an example, in which I hovered the mouse over the phrase “導體”.

Perakun pop-up translations work on anything displayed on a Firefox page, including news sites, email and chat windows. It handles both simplified and traditional characters and it’s got a pretty big dictionary. Go to the install page to get it.

Note: I’ve been big fan of perakun for years. The only reason I haven’t written about it sooner is that I thought everyone knew about it. I recently found out that a couple of my friends who are more motivated about Chinese learning than I am didn’t know about it and that’s why I’m writing now.

Muninn has made my Pinyin Tone Tool into something more useful– an OS X dashboard widget!

I’m happy to announce the results of a few hours of tinkering: The Pinyin Tone Widget. This OS X dashboard widget will take a series of Chinese pinyin words with tone numbers appended at the end of each syllable and will add the tone marks where appropriate (e.g. zhong1guo2 becomes zhōngguó).

Get it while it’s hot.

I wasn’t kidding when I said I liked the new dictionary at labs.chinesepod.com. After getting used to using it all the time via the search bookmark I made last week, I started wondering why I still had the MDBG searchbar up on my page.

After I quick consultation with David (CPod’s CTO), I had my answer. There wasn’t a searchbar for CPod’s uber-adsotated dictionary with audio recordings. So I decided to be bold and make one. You can see it in context in the picture below, and it’s now a part of toshuo.com’s sidebar. I’ve already run this by David, and if anyone would like to copy and distribute the image or the code to make the searchbar, go ahead!

Here’s the code:

<!-- CPod Dictionary Search -->
<div id="cdict">

<form method="get" action="http://labs.chinesepod.com/" target="_blank">
<div style="border: 1px solid rgb(192, 192, 192); padding: 0px 3px 5px;
background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); width: 200px; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://labs.chinesepod.com/dictionary"target="_blank">
<img alt="Chinese Pod Chinese-English dictionary" src="labsdict.png"
title="Chinese Pod Chinese-English dictionary" border="0"/>
<input value="node/4" name="q" type="hidden"/>
<div style="clear: both;"></div>
The Dictionary<input name="search" size="26" value="" onclick="this.focus();
 this.value='';" type="text"/></div></form>

</div><!--End Dictionary-->

And here’s the image (which you’ll have to upload to your blog host):

I have no design skills! If anyone can improve upon the look of the searchbar, I’m sure people would appreciate it.

I recently stumbled accross a site called Fuzzwich, that automates cheesy video design. Here’s the result of my first effort:

Recently, Lonnie (of OMBW) wrote about a pretty nice web tool that tests to see if a site is blocked in China or not. It’s free, and you can check your site’s accessibility from servers in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing. The name of the site is Website Pulse.

It’s been pretty accurate as far as I can tell. I had been getting about 30% of my traffic from China, until the past couple of weeks, during which that percentage fell to about 1%. During this time, the tool has been saying I was blocked. Now, it says I’m no longer blocked, and my traffic logs seem to confirm it.

Why I was blocked briefly, and then unblocked is a mystery.

The Romajinator is a simple tool that converts Japanese Katakana into romaji, i.e., roman characters. Most western students of Japanese will have little use for this tool, since katakana words are about the easiest Japanese there is to read for native English speakers. However, for students of Chinese, it’s the opposite. Kanji is pretty easy to understand, but katakana is pretty alien. Since the vast majority of katakana words are actually loan words from English, they’re often easy to guess… once they’re converted into romaji.

Examples

サラリーマン   ->   sararīman  -> "salary" man
コンピュータ   ->   konpyūta   ->  computer
サイエンス     ->   saiensu    ->  science
プロジェクト   ->   purojekuto ->  project
メソッド       ->   mesoddo    ->  method

Pronunciation

Most romaji vowels are pronounced fairly similarly to pinyin vowels. The big exception is the “e”. It’s pronounced fairly similarly to a “short e” in English. The “o” sounds somewhat like an English “long o”. Vowels with a macron bar over them are drawn out for a longer period of time. Doubled consonants represent a pause before the consonant. For example “setto” would sound like “se”, followed by a pause, and then “toe”.

The above is obviously a very rouge guide. For a more accurate idea of what words sound like, I recommend the Wikimedia Commons: Japanese pronunciation page.