Coloring Chinese Characters and Adding Pinyin Tone Marks

Coloring Chinese Characters and Adding Pinyin Tone Marks

Postby Ernie » Tue Apr 14, 2020 10:18 pm

There are a couple hidden features for those learning Chinese that I'll document here.
Both of these require you have a pinyin column that uses tone NUMBERS, not tone marks. If you try it out and have any suggestions for improvement, you can post here.

Currently, the only way to turn these features on is during the creation of a new deck. If you have an existing deck you want to use, you can export (with statistics) to a cloud location, update with new header (setting) information, and add back as a new deck.

Sample flashcard data:

* | add-pinyin-marks | 2
* | color-chinese | 1-2
Text 1 | Text 2 | Text 3
三 | san1 | three
上午 | shang4 wu3 | morning
下午 | xia4wu3 | afternoon

There are two different settings here:

add-pinyin-marks : if you have a column of pinyin with tone numbers, this setting will display the pinyin with tone marks. A possible advantage: when searching in the card listing, you will use tone numbers, not tone marks. On the header row, the number to the right is the Text # of your pinyin.


color-chinese : This setting will color your Hanzi characters based on tone. This requires you to have the corresponding pinyin (with tone numbers) in another column. (The app doesn’t know tones without your help.). You must use “5” for neutral tone. Pinyin can be with or without spaces. On the header row, the example shows “1-2” to the right. This means that Text 1 is the Hanzi and will be colored using the pinyin in Text 2.

If you import a deck with this color-chinese header, you’ll get a new row in "Global Options" called “Tone Colors”. You can change tone colors here. The current colors should match Pleco’s default. Also note that if you are using a custom layout, you can turn coloring on and off for each side separately, so the question can be without colors, and the answer side can reshow the Chinese, but colored.

To see a working example, search the Shared Library for a deck called "Chinese marks and color example"
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Ernie
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Re: Coloring Chinese Characters and Adding Pinyin Tone Marks

Postby Lawine » Fri Jul 10, 2020 3:30 am

Hello !

Thank you for this app and all theses features !

I tried the method with coloring the pinyn but don't seem to make it work.

I wrote exactly your example in a new sheet and the tones option did appear in the general option but my tones are still just black with a number in my deck.

It isn't really that big of a problem for me but I kind of wanted to test theses new options =D !

Is there a step I miss ?

Thank you again for your hard work !
Lawine
 

Re: Coloring Chinese Characters and Adding Pinyin Tone Marks

Postby Ernie » Fri Jul 10, 2020 5:10 am

Download the deck with private deck code of "cmace"

That should show you a working example. You can export.
In the "color-chinese" row, if you are using a spreadsheet to enter your own text, be careful because Excel will convert "1-2" to a date by default. You an prefice with an apostophe to force as text. Example: '1-2
Ernie
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Re: Coloring Chinese Characters and Adding Pinyin Tone Marks

Postby Lawine » Fri Jul 10, 2020 8:39 am

Thank you a lot, it's working perfectly !
I fear that it was the formatting of the number in google sheet which caused the problem. Thanks to your example deck, it worked after I pasted the two lines in my own sheet.

Flashcard Deluxe is so awesome, I discover news features every month :D !!
Lawine
 

Re: Coloring Chinese Characters and Adding Pinyin Tone Marks

Postby seb » Wed Oct 21, 2020 7:45 am

Hey Ernie,
I'm trying to get the Pinyin feature in Global Options and it doesn't seem to work for me. Could you perhaps re-upload the sample file or past it here? I'd appreciate it!
Thanks a lot,
Seb
seb
 

Re: Coloring Chinese Characters and Adding Pinyin Tone Marks

Postby Ernie » Thu Oct 22, 2020 7:49 am

Hi Seb,

To see a working example, search the Shared Library for a deck called "Chinese marks and color example"
Ernie
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Re: Coloring Chinese Characters and Adding Pinyin Tone Marks

Postby Guest » Thu Jul 08, 2021 5:45 am

Hi Ernie, tried colors today and it works great, before didn't really need it, because I've done coloring for book materials my self, but this is way faster for my new material.

How ever, there is one catch, no where will one be able to translate pinyin with tone marks to pinyin with tone numbers, that have 5 for fifth tone included, which means that should be done by hand then... Which isn't an issue if one has just few cards, but normally, while learning a new language, one will have at least few hundreds of sentences, which then can take lot of time to do, and could be done once or twice I guess with lot of effort.

I thought that you have made a script for translating tone marks to tone numbers with 5 included?
If so would be grateful if you added it to your website under Chinese tools or incorporate it in FCD, where user would need just to provide pinyin with tone marks and app would be able to then translate it to pinyin with tone numbers and then color everything.

Hope you understand my issue, its kinda chicken or egg problem, in order to use coloring option in the FCD at the moment, one has to have pinyin with tone numbers (5 included), but theres no platform online that will translate pinyin with tone marks to pinyin with tone numbers with 5 for fifth tone included, which then makes coloring option in your app unavailable to larger audience.

Thank

I can again do it all my self with
Guest
 

Re: Coloring Chinese Characters and Adding Pinyin Tone Marks

Postby Ernie » Mon Jul 12, 2021 9:35 am

You make a good point. Yeah, I think I have some code that adds "5" for missing neutral tones (pinyin), but as I recall it would not be easy to move to a website, which is why it hasn't been done yet. I just looked now and I can't find that code (shame on me), so at this time, I don't have it available in any form.
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Re: Coloring Chinese Characters and Adding Pinyin Tone Marks

Postby Style » Wed Jun 29, 2022 6:32 am

Hi Ernie. Thank you for this amazing app.
I want to apply those two functions (pinyin-mark and color chinese) to more than two columns, but there are some problems.
"color-chinese" function works in two columns.(Ex. color-chinese | 1-2, 3-4) However, "add-pinyin-marks" doesn't work.
Is it possible to apply "add-pinyin-marks" to muliple columns?
Thank you a lot.
Style
 

Re: Coloring Chinese Characters and Adding Pinyin Tone Marks

Postby Ernie » Thu Jun 30, 2022 9:12 pm

Hi Style,
Good point. I won't be adding support for more than one column, at least not anytime soon. Sorry about that. I can see that if you wanted a sample sentence in addition to a vocab word, for example, then the app just doesn't support this. I'll add it to my todo as a possible future update, but my list is long so I have to prioritize.
Ernie
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