Speaking Mandarin Pinyin

This language tool is released as Freeware. It may be useful to both English and Chinese speaking students as the program will pronounce terms in both Chinese and English. You may adjust the speed of playback as well as the volume. Many of the Pinyin pronunciations are both machine and real voice audio.

A Tabbed-View option has been added and one may switch between Tabbed and Un-tabbed.

These are the English words in Zhang1 Ju1 Li's Pinyin Dictionary. Please note that part of Juli's dictionary is a proposal for a new pronunciation of Chinese Pinyin as well. Selecting a word from this combobox searches Zhang's dictionary (Yellow box) and Paul Denisowski's CEDICT (Chinese-English Dictionary) Project (Pink box).

This combobox contains all (2217) Pinyin words (tones 1-5). Selecting the Pinyin displays all of the Simplified Chinese Characters for each (this is the difficulty in converting Pinyin to Chinese characters although I am working on a partial utility to do this.) If you select the Chinese character in the pink box by left clicking, dragging and releasing, The word will be pronounced using Microsoft's SAPI 5.1 library which must be installed. (See help file) Likewise, selecting Simplified Chinese characters or English will result in pronunciation in the large pink box (CEDICT) as well.

You may search both dictionaries for all occurrences of the term. I've updated this search mechanism recently (5-20-05)

This attempts a transliteration of the Pinyin. The ? shows you the rules. There are some errors here which I will hopefully be able to fix.

This is a browser window. It is displayed by selecting "Pinyin Dictionary". It displays Zhang's full Pinyin dictionary with links to his site, when selected. The help files also displays here. You can go back and forward, while home displays the dictionary.

The first time one selects General Links, the program will prompt you to install the links shortcuts. This defaults to extract to "c:\1down\Program Files\PinYinDict\Links\" and I have removed the option to install the program to a directory of your choice. If this is a problem, please, let me know.

You can now translate any webpage in both directions, Chinese/English using Systran at http://babel.altavista.com/ :

I can add an option to install this feature as a Toolbar in Internet Explorer, if so desired.

This file needs to be extracted to the installation directory and overwrite the existing file

In order to enjoy the full audio functionality of this tool, one must configure the operating system accordingly and obtain the additional audio files. You must have SAPI 5.1 installed and instructions are found under Help>Enabling International Support to pronounce the Simplified Chinese. This file is over 80 MB and can be obtained from the Microsoft site. SAPI allows pronunciation of Simplified Chinese. The combined audio files, which were recorded by Zhang Julli, can also be downloaded but this is about 35 MB. Therefore, I am offering the entire product on CD for a nominal price. It appears that the program will run fine without SAPI installed and without the audiofiles but therewill be no speech. You must also set your Regional Settings for Chinese (PRC) to view & pronounce Chinese characters which is explained in detail in the help file. The program has been tested on Windows XP only. It should work on Win 95 up but you may need to download the Visual Basic 6.0 runtime files for windows versions before WIndows 2000.

Notice:

You must download and install both files below to hear the speech in this program although it will run silently without them:

Microsoft Speech SDK 5.1 ( 68 MB Download File , Windows xp/2003 needn't be install.)

Microsoft Speech SDK 5.1 Language Pack ( 81.5 MB Download File )

Future plans and modifications:

Pinyin to Simplified & Traditional conversion utility.
Voice recognition in English and Chinese to assess accuracy in pronunciation. I've seen this functionality in a number of commercial programs and hopefully this will be easy with SAPI 5.1. If anyone knows how to construct a xml Grammar file with Simplified Chinese characters, please help me out. I am able to perform speech recognition in the Dictation Mode for SAPI 5.1 but I cannot use the Command and Control Mode with a limited number of words which will markedly increase the accuracy. [5-22-05]
Artificial intelligence program to engage one in a conversation in both English and Pinyin. This will hopefully include a typed and spoken chat. Presently, I am working on the Eliza AI psychiatrist algorithm but I hope to expand this with a little help from my friends.
The transliteration utility needs to be tweaked. I am planning on using a standardized international pronunciation methodology. The Moby Project has this functionality. Likewise, I found a simpler method in the American Heritage Dictionary.
An Optical Character Recognition utility to read handwritten text is planned. I'm hoping to be able to recognize Simplified characters in order to teach this also. This will be pretty hard especially if I also track the stroke order.
I am not a great computer programmer but I do believe I can code this stuff in Visual Basic 6.0. Any additional help would be appreciated and I will post the source code soon.
Add Chinese <> English webpage translation to Internet Explorer (Toolbar). Completed [05-20-05] using Babelfish on Altavista and driven by Systran.
[5-21-05] I have received some feedback on the graphic interface. The request was for a less colorful and more standard style. I will try to add additional "skins" and appearances for personal preferences. I liked the multicolored appearance because it made it easier to describe in this help file. I wasn't thinking that approximately 1 in 76 or 1.30% or 3.5 million people are color blind in the USA alone. Completed [05-22-05] with a choice of Tabbed or Un-Tabbed.
I am evaluating an expanded dictionary of 140,000 entries using the Adso SQL database[http://www.adsotrans.com]. I am indebted to David Lancashire for the files. His sites [http://www.newsinchinese.com] are excellent instructional aids. His Visual C++ source code is also available for download. [05-21-05]

Contact me (Warren Goff): wgoff@tampabay.rr.com

If you email me, I will attempt to keep you informed of any upgrades to the program.

# Hits